The Craft of Presidential Speechwriting - Dr. Craig Smith

For score and seven years ago, it's morning in America, a kinder gentler nation. What makes a great political speech? I'm Kay McIntyre, and today on KPR presents the Craft of the Presidential Speech Rider. It's the Dole Institute of Politics presidential lecture series, the second in the 2020 series. This event featured Dr. Craig Smith, a speech rider for President Gerald Ford, a consulting speech rider for George H. W. Bush, an author of Confessions of a Presidential Speech Rider. This event was held February 11, 2020, and was moderated by Audrey Coleman, Associate Director of the Dole Institute of Politics. The way I became a presidential speech rider could only happen in America. I was an undergraduate debater where I got a lot of training in how to make cases, how to sift evidence, how to build arguments. I then went on for a PhD in communication studies where I focused on the ancients, Aristotle on rhetoric, Ciceroan oratory, Quintillian wrote a book called The Institutes of Oratory,

all those things are incorporated in the speech riding craft. I then became a professor of communication studies focusing on rhetoric and public address. I wound up after starting at San Diego State. I wound up at the University of Virginia, and I was at the University of Virginia in 1976, and I was invited down to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to give a guest lecture. My guest lecture was at 10 in the morning. It turned out that Gerald Ford was lecturing on the campus at noon to the future homemakers of America. The liberal faculty turned to me, and I consider myself a legitimate conservative, so rare these days. We watched Gerald Ford's speech, and it was not good. I went back to Charlottesville and I couldn't sleep, so I got up and I wrote a single space

five-page letter, and the next morning I mailed it off to the president of the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and then I could sleep, and I didn't think anything more would come of it. A week later, I was called by the director of White House personnel and was asked to come up for an interview, and what had happened was when the letter came in, somebody in the mail room remembered that they had just fired a speechwriter, and so my letter was sent up to White House personnel. I came up for the interview, I began my interview with him. He then took me to the editor for the speechwriters, Bob Orban. I realized that if I screwed up at any point, I'd be out the front to work the White House. He then took me to Bob Hartman, who was the Councillor of the president, and we went through a long interview about how I would write speeches, if I wrote speeches, and so on, and so forth, and at the end of the interview he said, could you wait here just a minute? Now Hartman's office was the old office that Nixon's secretary had, the one who did the

Rosemary stretch, and then he came back in, and he took me into the Oval Office, and there was Gerald Ford puffing on a pipe, and Hartman said, pending security clearance, Mr. President, we'd like to hire Professor Smith as your new speechwriter. And the president said, Professor Seven, done very well here. They try to make me sound more eloquent than I am, and they throw me deadlines. And I said, oh, I'm not one of those absent-minded professors. I write very quickly, and I'm going to be efficient, and I'll do what I can for you. And he said, well, just please make me speak the language of the common man, and that's how I got hired. I mean, just starting at the top, and I'd never written a speech for anybody else but myself. So as I say, only in America. So you mentioned in their interview, you laid out your process by which you would write for the president.

How did that bear out in practice? Did you have to adjust your expectations and how? Well, the first thing that happened was, they put me in a broom closet for an office, and they said, read all of the president's speeches and all of his testimony when he became vice president, and see if you can come up with a style for the president. And I went in, after I did all that, and I went in to see Robert Hartman, and he said, well, what do you think of the president's style? And I said, I don't think he has one. It depends on who's writing. In 1977, only 6% of Alabama's identified as Republicans.

That's the change we've gone through in the South. And so we needed to raise money, and we needed to get people to come in to Birmingham and raise money for the Republican Party. And we asked John Connelly, he said, no, it's not a chance, Ronald Reagan, no, not a chance. And so we asked George H.W. Bush, if he would come over. And he was friends with the Tut Waller family. And so he agreed to come over. And I was at a table at this fundraiser, and there was this nerdy kind of blonde young man next to me. And he said, I understand you were a speech writer for President Ford, and I said, yes, I was. And he said, why don't you evaluate this for the table? We won't tell anybody. I said, well, all right. So George Bush got up and gave the speech. And then the nerdy little kid said, what do you think of it?

And I said, well, it was a little, the man is obviously sincere, he's authentic, but he needs organization, there's stylistic devices he could use, and so on and so forth. And he looked at me and he said, my name is Karl Rove. And I worked for him, and I said, oh my gosh, I'm sorry. And he said, no, no, no, how would you like to come up and have a cocktail with him? He heard from Gerald Ford that you're a good writer, and he'd like to talk to you. And so that's how I got on with him. I was just, again, coincidental. So talk a little bit more about working with President Bush, right? George H.C. Bush was my favorite client of all time. I, after that happened, I had to clear with some of his other friends, Jennifer Fitzgerald. And then I was flown to Houston to do another interview at the house. And so I showed up at the Bush man's in my three-piece suit. And the door opens on the side of the house and out comes George Bush in an eyes-awed t-shirt.

And he looks at me and he says, if you'll get out of that silly vest, I'll cook you breakfast. And that was the kind of guy he was. I mean, he's just magnificent. And so we go into the kitchen, and he gives me a cup of coffee, and I'm standing there with a cup of coffee. I've got my coat off, my vest off, and he's cooking eggs, and in comes Barbara Bush. And she looks at me, and she looks at George. And she looks at me, and then she looks at George. And she says, George, if that man spills a drop of that coffee on the floor, I will never forgive you because the Chinese delegation is coming in to stay with us tonight for dinner. And I don't know what got into me, but I looked at her and I said, ma'am, I came to your door in a three-piece suit. I don't spill anything. And she laughed, and he laughed, and I spent the rest of the day with them. Those were the kind of people they were. I mean, they were just, he was such a gentleman, and just so high-minded and so wonderful to work with.

And she was so supportive of the staff, very protective of him, and that's understandable. But she was on the side of the better angels that were around George Bush. Around any president, there were also some darker angels, and you have to fight with them, and that's always fun, but they were wonderful people. Did you ever see what you thought was a good speech, go bad, so to speak? I, not in, none of mine, because I, of course not, I insist, I can't think of one, actually. I mean, there were glitches, there was one time where President Ford was delivering his speech that I wrote in the, in the East Room of the White House, and it was for the Pennsylvania delegation on the way to the convention. And the Pennsylvania delegation, as you may recall, was up for grabs, and eventually Ronald Reagan would name Senator Richard Schweiker as his vice presidential candidate, trying to steal that delegation.

So Ford got up to give this speech, and he suddenly deviated from the text to tell a personal story, which he rarely did. Then he went back to the text, I had written the personal story in the text, and so he repeated it. And everybody knew what had happened. But then he recovered and he laughed and he went on, and eventually Nelson Rockefeller got up and applauded and got him off the stage, and we got away with that. As the speechwriter, did you have any input or influence over the venue or any of the other production details in which your speech was delivered? Once you get credibility as a speechwriter, you, the glory of it is, you can sometimes influence policy. And I began to suggest certain campaign changes, that the president speak less, but speak on certain topics very in depth, because I thought his strength was on the issues, whereas Carter's strength was transcendent, and I'm never going to lie to you and I'm religious

and so on and so forth. And there was a debate over my proposal between various people in front of the president and the president said, I'm going with what Craig wants, and it was just stunning. And he wrote me a note, and I still have that note, thank you for that suggestion. And we win this, the note actually says, when we win this election, I'm going to move you over to the political division, which would have been nice, but we didn't win the election. You can gain influence as a speechwriter that way, but you have to be credible first. You have to have some successful speeches. What would you say was perhaps the biggest or some of the biggest challenges related to writing for the president's? I think it's a collaborative operation. The speechwriters want the president to be as effective as possible. The political people want him to say what adjusts to the poll data, and so there is the tension between those things where we think certain things should be said in a certain

way, and they think they should be said in another way, and there's always that tension. But I had talked to a friend of mine who was a writer for Richard Nixon, and the Nixon people were very good, the writers were very good at adapting to the poll data. Nixon had a 24-hour polling group in 68. And the poll question was, what is the most important question facing America, or what is the most important problem facing America? And once the person answered, they then went to a second step, and they said, what is your suggested solution? And so in 1968, number one was Vietnam, number two was the economy, number three was crime. Then the suggested solutions were in Vietnam, half the people, relatively, wanted to withdraw, and half the people wanted to escalate. So what they did, the Nixon writers did, for his acceptance speech was he sends four long paragraphs on the problem of Vietnam, therefore meeting the expectation of the audience.

But he doesn't suggest a solution, if you may recall, because the audience is divided. He says, because we're in negotiation in Paris, I can't undercut our operations there, but I promise you peace with honor. So he transcended the division. Then when he went to the economy, it's one short paragraph on the problem and a lot of solutions, because he's got 75% of the audience on his side, and the same thing with crime. And so people were nodding as they went through that. And so then at the end of that speech, if you ever flash back to it, there's a wonderful consideration at the end about hearing trains in the night and the American dream. And Nixon comes to embody the American dream. And so the speech writers get to go full force at the end of the speech by giving end of the pollsters at the top of the speech. Those are the kinds of things and negotiations that are exciting and difficult, but when everything

clicks together, it's really wonderful. Our last program, we talked about five great presidential speeches. Would you weigh in on maybe one of what might be your greatest presidential speech in your estimation? For me, and I'm probably agreeing with David Zarefsky, I think the second inaugural of Lincoln is really wonderful because it's compassionate, it's healing, it's calling for bringing the country together, I just think that's a wonderful address. I think one of the addresses that's probably a little underrated is Jefferson's first inaugural. The election had been horribly bitter between Jefferson and John Adams and the Federalists and the anti-Federalists and all kinds of dirty politics had gone on then. If you think it's bad now, it was really bad back then. And Jefferson says at one point in that speech, we are all Federalists, we are all anti-Federalists.

He tries to bring the country together and unite it, and I think that's an awfully good presidential speech. What speech of yours is your favorite? I think the speech during the bicentennial at Valley Forge, where I start by talking about these soldiers surviving in their rag-bound feet around these fires, starving and eventually surviving at Valley Forge, but then looking forward to what that tells us about sacrifice and how sacrifice has worked for America, particularly for its soldiers and how we need to honor that as we move forward. I was very proud of that speech. So we talked a little bit about speech writing during a campaign and for a sitting president. You've written speeches or language for folks who are involved in debates. What does that relate to speech writing and how is your preparation different?

Oh, the debate thing is an entirely different world. I mean, it is very difficult, and I coached the president for the debates along with other people. I actually coach Dan Coil for his debate in 1988, and I can tell you about that experience. But you just don't know what's going to happen, and it's all about the expectation game. So when Ford went into the first debate with Carter, the expectation was that Ford was going to lose, because Carter was this nuclear engineer when he went to Annapolis, Ford tended to bumble here and there and mispronounce words, and Ford came out of that debate beating expectations and beating Carter, and suddenly the race was dead even. Then we went to the second debate, and we knew what questions that was going to be on

foreign policy. It was at the Palace of the Arts in San Francisco, and we prepped the president. Remember that Ronald Reagan had criticized Ford's policy of detent with the Soviet Union. Reagan wanted a tougher policy in the 76 primaries. So we knew that was going to be a question, and the question came from Max Franco of the New York Times. And he said, you know, President Ford, how do you defend your policy of detent with the Soviet Union when there's such a brutal nation? And Ford said, look, you know, Yugoslavia has never given into them. Romania is moving toward freedom. They don't dominate Poland, and went on, and then Franco had a follow-up. He said, did you say the Soviet Union doesn't dominate Poland, and the president said, yes, that's what I said. So after the debate, we ran up to the president and said, Mr. President, you said the Soviet Union doesn't dominate Poland.

You need to pull the press conference, and immediately say, you misspoke yourself. And he said, but I didn't say that. And we said, well, what did you think you said? I said, what, we rehearsed, and what was that, Mr. President? He said, the Soviet Union does not dominate the hearts and minds of the Polish people. He said, wish you had said that. Well, Henry Kissinger came up, and he said, what's going on? And we explained the situation. And that the president needed to immediately hold a press conference and say, he misspoke himself. And Kissinger said, you can't do that. I'm trying to get Anatoly Shoranski out of the Soviet Union. If you insult the Soviet Union, our talks will collapse. Long story short, they debated it for five days, and finally in California, Ford corrected the record, but it was too late. The election slipped away. So these debates are just mind-boggling retents. When we rehearsed the debates with Dan Quail, the person who stood in for Lloyd Benson was

his colleague on the Finance Committee, Senator Bob Packwood, who was an excellent debater. And in the three debates we did with Quail, he did very well. And you have to remember Dan Quail got into the Senate by winning a debate against Birch By, who was no slouch. So we thought he was going to be okay when he went into the debate with Lloyd Benson. But during our practice session, Marilyn Quail at one point interrupted what was going on and said, you know, Danny, you need to tell them that you're more qualified than John Kennedy was when he was running for president. And you're just running for vice president. And Lee Atwater was there and he said, you can't say that. You can't compare yourself to John Kennedy, he's a saint, he's a martyr, whatever you do don't do it. So the debate goes forward, and we are all sitting out there watching what's happening and out comes Dan Quail.

And Robin Rowland can tell you this, if you're a debate coach, you've seen this. Your debaters for the first time get into a final round. And it's like the deer in the headlights, they are just stunned and they can't say anything right. And so for the first few questions, Dan Quail is a little discombobulated and not the guy we've seen in these rehearsals because it's a different situation with the bright lights and the big audience and so on and so forth, but he recovers and he gets going. And then comes the inevitable question, you know, what is the first thing you would do if the president were incapacitated? Well we'd rehearsed if the president died, big difference. If the president's incapacitated, you have to bring the cabinet together, they have to vote that the president's incapacitated and then you are temporary president and so on and so forth. So it was a different question than we had expected. So he took Roger Ailes' advice, who was one of his mentors and dodged the question.

He said, what you really mean to ask is am I qualified to be president and then he gave his qualifications and then they went through a few more questions and it came back again and somebody said that it, you know, that wasn't the question we asked you before. The question we asked you before is what if the president was incapacitated? He dodged it again. Then it came to Tom Brokaw and Tom Brokaw said, look, you're not answering the question. Do you know what you would do if the president was incapacitated? And Dan Quayle said, listen, I'm more qualified now than John Kennedy was when he ran for president and of course Lloyd Benson said, and you can see him like his lips, you know, I was a friend of John Kennedy, you know, John Kennedy. So debate and then we were all just like, oh, now what's going to happen with the poll that it didn't change at all, that had no impact on the election, believe it or not. The media made a big deal out of it and I think it's just people don't vote for vice president.

They just vote for president and so we got off with that one but debates are really tough. The other one was I helped with George W. Bush in the 1984, he was vice president and you may recall he debated Geraldine Ferraro and that's a very tough thing to do. It's tough on women because they face a binary. If they're tough, then that has a bad word associated with it. If they're soft, then they're not up to the presidency and so handling that situation for a woman is very difficult and I've coached some women in debate. On the other hand, when we were coaching George W. Bush, we told him to be careful. You don't want to be mean to your female opponent. At the same time, you want to establish yourself as an expert so we recommended that he simply answer the questions and always look forward and not respond or direct anything to Geraldine

Ferraro and that worked until three quarters of the way through the debate and she said something about foreign policy that didn't make sense to him and suddenly he turned and he said, let me help you with that, Geraldine, and then answer the question. We had this man-splaining moment and we all went, oh my god, so I mean, you don't blame the coaches. So, other tense situations, did you ever do any writing for crisis response and how is the process different? Yeah, it's very different. It's very different. I don't know if you recall, but at one point in the Ford administration in 1976, Cambodia seized a merchant marine vessel called the Maya Gens. I was on vacation and my pager went off and they said, you've got to get back to the White House.

And so we're writing a speech for the president. He's going to deliver it to the nation from the Oval Office while all this other stuff is going on in the situation room, how are we going to respond? And it was a very different writing experience because I was, what are we going to do and then how is the president going to express that to the nation? And what we are going to do, the respond kept changing. And so I had to keep changing the speech and rewriting it and rewriting it. But there was nothing political about this. There was nothing in terms of, you know, there could be some patriotism involved, but it was really just to inform the public not to panic that we're doing something about this. And eventually we actually seized the ship and special forces did a terrific job and then writing that. But we always tried to keep those things out of the political arena. Because then if you get those things into the political arena, then you sully them, then they're open to attack from the other side and it becomes a political football.

I mean, there's, I have no problem with somebody attacking the handling of this. The president mishandled it or if we're in a war that we shouldn't be in. But the announcement of a crisis, I think, is rather pristine and objective and should be isolated from the political world. In our program last week, we talked about how a successful president that is a successful speech deliverer and a speechwriter are crafting a broader narrative. Were you able to do that relatively early in your time with the Ford presidency and the Bush presidency? Or was that something that you felt like evolved over time? Did you feel like you had a cohesive body of work with? I think it evolved over time. One of the things that you try to work out is what is the delivery style that works for these people best as you're crafting this narrative of where they're going? Ford's the statement that Robert Hartman wrote for Ford just after Ford was sworn in after

Nixon resigned that the long dark nightmare for America is over, it was a wonderful moment. And that was the narrative, that established the narrative. We're going to make a comeback, America is going to make a comeback, we're going to bounce off Watergate, it's a low moment, we're going to bounce off Vietnam and we're going to try and bring America back and the bicentennial is a wonderful excuse to do that. But in terms of style, Barack Obama, for example, spoke in what we call the speechwriter jargon the periodic style. This is the march of paragraphs across the page, Lincoln had it, you know, of the people, by the people, for the people. And Barack Obama was very compatible with that because of the black pulpits that he had experienced in his lifetime. Bill Clinton was very different, Bill Clinton was talking to you all the time, you were in Bill Clinton's living room. Very conversational style, Reagan had that, you know.

And so finding that style for your candidate, your client is very different, different for each of them. And with Ford, it was, you know, very plain, spoken with Bush, H. W. Bush, when I started working with him, I realized that he was a very kind man, that he was a very gentle man, that he, and that was part of the narrative, that he was sophisticated, very witty. And so in 1980, I wrote a speech for him, which he delivered in Philadelphia during the Pennsylvania primary, which we eventually won, and it was called a different kind of president. And in there, there was a line about how he wanted to create a kinder, gentler nation. And the speech got ruined because P. T. Lee, Bush's press secretary snuck a line into the speech that Reagan economics was voodoo economics.

And so everybody remembered the voodoo economics side, and this is, when you're a speech writer, it's very frustrating when people do that to your speeches. And so, you know, that was, that was the tension and the line got forgotten. So when we got up to 1988 and he was accepting the nomination, I got that line back in, the kinder gentler nation, and that was one of the lines that was remembered. But of course, the other line that was remembered was Peggy Noonans, you know, read my lips, no new taxes. So you had the tough guy on the one side, you know, the Texan bush, and the kinder gentler bush, and luckily, he's still on the election. But you, often if you look at these speeches, you can see that they have more than one writer, and that there's more than one speaker.

Speech writer for President Gerald Ford, and a consulting speech writer for President George H. W. Bush. He spoke February 11, 2020 at the University of Kansas Dull Institute of Politics as part of their annual presidential lecture series. This event was moderated by Associate Director Audrey Coleman. Dr. Smith now takes questions from the audience. When President Ford asked you to make him sound like the common man, did that cause you to write his speeches as if you were the one that was speaking it, do you consider yourself representative of the common man? There's a lot of me that I think identifies with the common man. I came out of the lower middle class. My father was a Navy man.

He started as a sailor. He was blown off his ship in Pearl Harbor and swam to shore and survived. And I think we common man have an appreciation of that. Ford had served. H. W. had served. I mean, he was the youngest pilot in World War II. And so speaking the language of the common man, I think is something I could resonate with. But let me tell you something. I think Franklin Roosevelt spoke the language of the common man. And what that means is you're not using high-falutin words. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. How simple can you get? Those are all small words. It's the rhythm and the alliteration that makes that memorable. We should never negotiate in fear, but we should never fear to negotiate. John Kennedy. All small words. It's the caismas there that makes that memorable. And so you can speak the language of the common man and at the same time be memorable and

actually heroic and probably more sublime than if you tried to be eloquent and use big words that turn people off. Any other questions? I'm curious in the fraternity of presidential speechwriters. I'm curious do you have a professional or any kind of contact with the person or persons that write speeches for Donald Trump? And if you do, I'm anxious to hear not only your reaction, but their challenge, their reactions to his somewhat sort of rogue style. And is that exciting for them or is that a completely frustrating experience as a speech writer? Thank you for the question. I am not in contact with them, but I follow them. Steve Miller is this chief writer and whatever you think of Steve Miller and the words he's putting in the president's mouth, Steve Miller is a talented speech writer. If you look at the speech that Donald Trump gave at accepting the nomination at the Republican

convention, it was 75 minutes long, which is probably 25 minutes too much. And it needed to be edited, but it was a very clever speech. The Republican convention every day had a different theme, and it was based on the Make America Great Again theme, so that everything was unified. Make America safe again, make America work again, and so on and so forth. And then Trump got up to close down the convention with his acceptance speech and the last four lines of the speech were the same as those four days. Make America safe again, make America work again, make America great again. That worked very well, I thought, in terms of effectiveness. I'm not talking about the morality of it. The problem you would have if you were a speech writer for Trump is that very often he doesn't stick to the text and doesn't have one at his rallies, which are really kind of populist in the old paranoid style that Hofstetter talked about.

That's just Trump spouting off and doing what he does that some of his audience is like. The inaugural address is very dark, and Miller wrote it that way, because they wanted to say, these are dark times. Now we're going to make America great again. It's got to be better than what we're describing here. And so then the speeches from then on are trying to build this up. If you look at the state of the union addresses, the strategy is really interesting. In 1988, Ronald Reagan gave his last state of the union address. Right before it, a plane had taken off in January, the icing hadn't come off the wings. The plane went into the 14th street bridge, crashed into the Potomac River. A young man named Lenny Scottnick got off the banks, jumped in the ice stream river, and started pulling people out.

When Reagan got up to give his state of the union address, he invented recognizing somebody in the galley, and he recognized Lenny Scottnick, one person, as a American hero. And from that point on, every president said somebody in the galleries, well, Trump has taken this to the Nth division. I mean, he's had 10, 15 people in the galleries. What does this do? It distracts from a lot of the policy stuff that he's laying out. But it also, if you're a Democrat sitting in the audience and you don't want to applaud for this president, and he's pointing to a hero in the galleries, and you're caught on camera not applauding, you're in real trouble. And so that's the strategy, and it's very clever. I'm not talking about the morality again. I'm just talking about the rhetorical effectiveness of it. So I think they have a hard job writing for Trump. I mean, I think it would just be a mind-blowing to try and keep him on track, because when he's on the teleprompter, and he's doing what Steve Miller tells him to do, they're

effective speeches. And then when he's on his own, he says things that are just sometimes, you know, unverifiable. Be the nice way to put it. Other questions? I have two, possibly. The first one relates to your comment about President Ford, and you had shared that he mentioned to you that if he won, he would move you to his political group, and of course that didn't happen. My question there is, have you had a moment in your career where you felt like you really were able to shoehorn in, and maybe get a little bit of your politics inserted into the message that you were helping someone else deliver? Yeah. One of the things that I was very much in favor of is using our agricultural surpluses instead of burning them, or dumping them in the ocean, or letting all the milk go away, so the

prices would go up, was to create a food bank, and take those things to Africa or Asia or wherever they were needed, and the president said, we'll do that right after the election, which is nice. If you get to a credible point with a president, with your client, you can influence policy. I've worked in, for many other people, the shortest presidential campaign ever probably was Pete Wilson's campaign, Governor Wilson to California in 1996, and I was the chief writer there, the only writer there, and that's the difference between the campaign and the president. I mean, the president has five speech writers. Elizabeth Warren probably only has one. Pete Wilson only had one. George H. W. Bush, when we were in the campaign, from 78 through 80, he only had one or two. You know, White House, you have this big staff.

So yeah, you can, if you get the trust, and you have a good idea, you get input into policy, and that's really a wonderful benefit of the job when it works out. Did you have a second question? We'll come back to it. Okay. Olivia? Yeah, just curious about, he were writing speeches today, social media being a tool. Use it, not use it, what do you think of? You've got to use it, and hopefully you can use it for good. I think of social media, there's a lot of problems with it, and we all know what they are. But if you consider it like chemistry, that it can be used for good or evil, you need to get in that mix and figure out how to do it. Barack Obama was very effective with social media. The president is very effective with tweets. He gets past the media, people who believe in him and want to be affirmed, just look at

his tweets and don't look at anybody else's. And you know, that's one of the problems we have with social media and all the cable. If I believe in something crazy, I can find somebody out there that also is saying the same thing on some cable station somewhere and affirm myself, and that's the problem we have with social media. It's much harder now to break through as a speech writer to get your candidate to break through all of the social media and all the affirmation that's going on. If people are watching these democratic debates and it looks like they are, that's a way to break through. I mean, you can have a good debate like Amy Klohmuchar did in the last one. You can have a good town hall meeting like Pete Buttigieg did early on, and suddenly you're there where you weren't there before.

So they are breaking through. But if I were advising a campaign, I would have a strategy group on social media and how to use them because if you don't, you're excluding a whole audience that you could be reaching in some way. Hi, you alluded briefly to writing for women, and I was just curious if you were writing for a female president, would you approach that any differently or in any ways than you did with previous male presidents? I think you have to because of the binary that women face and you have to be sensitive to it. One of the things that I would do, you'll notice, for example, you haven't seen a female Democrat candidate, correct me if I'm wrong, wear a dress in any of these debates. They're all in pantsuits or some variation of that. And that's to make them more manly, more presidential. I once advised Senator Paula Hawkins from Florida on what to wear. And it was a black pantsuit with white piping so that she was defined.

And she did very well in her debate. What are the things that are attributed to women that you want to avoid emotionalism? So let's have a very fact-based policy-oriented, highly documented approach. I think that's what they've told Elizabeth Warren. And she's done well with that. On occasion, unfortunately, she contradicted herself or changed her position on Medicare for all. And that got her in a little trouble. But that's where she was going, you know, it was that. Now Amy Klobuchar, when she's been successful, she contradicts my rule a little bit. But it was heartfelt and it seemed authentic when she stated, I see you, and identified with her audience. That was very effective. It was a risk, but I think it worked. And so there are just things that you want to go through that.

If I were writing for a woman, it would be very fact-based, it would be argument-based, it would be very organized, because you're not supposed to be able to read a map. So, you know, which is nonsense, but you want no roaming around. And so it would be along those lines. At what time for two more here? I know when I'm writing, I have moments where I can't put a word on a page. And as a writer yourself, especially with these speeches that are so important, how do you go about not being able, like having writer's block and handling that pressure that goes through that? It's an excellent question. And I am one of those strange people who has never had writer's block. I don't know what it is, but the advice I give is the advice that Ernest Hemingway gave. Ernest Hemingway had writer's block, you know, for a long time. And he said that what he did was to write one important true sentence, and then write

back to it. There is a novel that his evil wife Mary published against his wishes after he was dead. And it's called The Garden of Eden. And it's based on a short story that's the first chapter. And the last line of the first chapter is, and then he never could love her again. And then the whole chapter leads up to that. And when you read that line, it just hits you like somebody slapped you in the face. It's just incredible. So I would recommend if you get writer's block to try the Hemingway method, try to write one true important sentence, and then everything will flow out after that. Right here. If you could write one more presidential speech, what would it be? The State of the Union, and why? I think since I never was able to do it, I'd love to write it in an inaugural address.

I would like to call people to the values that I believe in. I think the calling to people to those values and then displaying those values, living by those values, practicing what you preach, setting a tone for the whole four years of that presidency would be a wonderful thing to do. And I would certainly use the Lincoln and Ogros as my model. Excellent question. And that's a great way to end our conversation. Thank you so much, Dr. Smith, for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. You've just heard Dr. Craig Smith, former presidential speechwriter for Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, an author of Confessions of a Presidential Speech Rider. Dr. Smith was the featured speaker, February 11, 2020, at the Dole Institute of Politics Annual Presidential Lecture Series. If you missed the first in this year's presidential lecture series, the five best presidential speeches of all time, it's now archived at our website, KansasPublicRadio.org.

I'm Kay McIntyre. KPR presents is a production of Kansas Public Radio at the University of Kansas.