In Austin, Scully and Gerson had at first written pieces of speeches and sewn them together. Within a few weeks, the two men had started writing the speeches jointly. In January 2000, John McConnell joined, completing the trio.
A Yale-educated lawyer, McConnell had written speeches for Quayle and eventually took the same job with Vice President Cheney. A native of Bayfield, Wisconsin, McConnell had a square jaw and an unreconstructed earnestness that was not influenced by years in Washington. “I love the history of the [White House], and always have, all my life,” McConnell said in 2006. “I feel so grateful to be a part of it. It’s never lost the thrill for me. I’ve got a better view than the President—he doesn’t get to look at the White House!” It was the kind of comment that would be written off as affected schmaltz coming from almost anyone else, but from John McConnell it was just true. “Imagine a typical all-American good guy circa 1950,” fellow speechwriter Joe Shattan said. “That’s McConnell.”
“In his hands moral and religious ideas…had a more solid feel,” Scully wrote of McConnell. “As a general rule in Bush speeches, if the writing is graceful, judicious and understated, and makes you think about the subject at hand instead of anyone’s particular craftsmanship or religiosity—there’s a better-than-even chance that it is by John McConnell.”
McConnell had a capacity for producing original phrases, but he often risked losing them by trying to improve on them. This happened on September 12, 2001, when the three men were trying to come up with an opening for Bush’s National Cathedral speech. They knew they needed something with lift and ring. McConnell suggested that Bush say the country was in the “middle hour of our grief.” Gerson and Scully looked at each other, thrilled with the eloquence. Then McConnell started second-guessing himself until one or both told him to stop.
“Usually when you’re a speechwriter, even for a president of the United States, the words don’t make that much difference,” Gerson said years later, in a startling admission. “It’s important to have a high standard. It’s important to have some knowledge of the tradition. But there are a few moments, historical moments, where the words really matter and count. And I lived through a couple of them. And if we had not done a good job [for the Cathedral speech] it would have hurt the country.”
“We are here in the middle hour of our grief,” Bush told an audience that included four former presidents and most of the capital’s political, military, law enforcement, and intelligence leadership—and the nation. “So many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation’s sorrow.” He talked about those who had lost their lives just going through their regular day and those “who defied their murderers” to save other lives.
The president made one apparent slip. “Our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil,” he said. Scully is “reasonably certain” that the final draft of the speech had the word “this,” as in “rid the world of this evil”—an enormous difference in describing the scope of the challenge. “It is no small goal,” R.W. Apple, Jr., wrote in The New York Times, “reminiscent in a way of Woodrow Wilson’s promise that World War I would make the world safe for democracy.” Some diplomats, reported Dana Milbank and Dan Balz in The Washington Post, viewed the statement as a vow of “final victory over terrorism that is not realistic.”
Scully doubts that Bush intentionally dropped the “this.” “I’m sure that the man didn’t stand up there promising to rid the world of evil,” he said.
Gerson, who usually made it a practice not to watch Bush’s speeches in person, was at the National Cathedral. He described it as a “profoundly emotional experience” that reached a peak when the audience sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He teared up. It hit him again that the country was at war. “I hadn’t expected that,” he said. “I had come as a domestic policy person. You could see that life was going to change, that everything was going to be different.”
For the speech to the nation on September 11, and for virtually all foreign policy speeches, the troika had help from John Gibson, the NSC’s speechwriter. He was unique in speechwriting history, a holdover from a previous administration of another party. Gibson had started at the NSC as a Clinton speechwriter in 2000. During the transition, a standard e-mail was sent to all NSC staff—political appointees and civil servants, though as a practical matter it traditionally was meant only for the latter—instructing people how to request to stay on in the new administration. Gibson had previously worked at a law firm with Stephen Hadley, the incoming deputy national security adviser, so he sent in his name. When Hadley called him with a job offer, Gibson figured that he could stay on for a short time while thinking about what he wanted to do. And anyway, the differences between the incoming Bush administration and the outgoing Clinton administration on foreign policy did not seem sharp. He thought writing for the president and helping the country was a high honor.
Going to work on January 20, 2001, was “an extremely odd experience,” Gibson said. “I felt like somebody who had been left on the roof of the Saigon embassy and all my friends had gotten on the last helicopter.” He expected some level of suspicion given his background, but was treated as if he had been on the team from the start. “Except for the ideological vertigo, it was great,” he quipped.
But there were differences between the administrations. The Bush crowd ran things more efficiently and seemed to have less internal politicking. They also took themselves more seriously. The Clinton crowd had a greater sense of fun. More immediate, where Gibson had been one of several NSC speechwriters reporting to the national security adviser under Clinton, he was the only one in the new administration. He reported to Gerson and as well to Rice. He was well liked by his colleagues, most of whom assumed that he was a civil servant rather than a former Democratic political appointee. Bush called him “the Clintonite,” with good humor and warmth. When in late 2002 Bush learned that Gibson was finally leaving the administration, he remarked, “Good soul.”
Bush spent the weekend after 9/11 at Camp David.* He returned to the White House on Sunday afternoon and met with Hughes and other communications staffers in the residence to talk about what he would like to say in a speech to the nation. The date had not yet been set. Hughes took notes: “America is united and strong…. Praise Congress…. By uniting in capital, we’ve helped unite nation…. Single out, we’re Americans now, not Republicans or Democrats…. Here’s what we need to do…. The world has rallied…. Call to action, we will routthem out…Define mission…War is not against one person or one group, it’s against terrorism.” She suggested that the speech should evoke examples of the everyday heroism that had been displayed since the attacks. (“We have seen the State of our Union in the endurance of rescuers, working past exhaustion,” Bush would say in his speech to Congress. “We have seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. We have seen the decency of a loving and giving people who have made the grief of strangers their own.”)
Hughes saw Bush again the next morning, Monday, September 17. Military action could come at any time. “If we’ve done something, discuss what we have done,” Bush instructed for the speech. “If not, tell people to get ready.” (“And tonight, a few miles from the damaged Pentagon, I have a message for our military: Be ready,” he would say.) He wanted a draft that evening, Bush told her. That would be impossible, Hughes said. “I want it by 7,” he said. When she told Gerson, he said, difficult, if not impossible. “I already tried that,” Hughes told him. McConnell said the same thing when Gerson passed that on. We can’t do that. I already tried that with Karen, and she tried it with the president, Gerson replied.
The three men sat down around the computer set up in McConnell’s office—they almost always wrote in McConnell’s office. They had a few shorthand notes on the screen from their conversations with Bush the previous Thursday, and with Rice, political aide Karl Rove,
and others: “Darkness. Light…harm/evil…challenge…enemy…defeat and destroy. Eyes open…alerted. We’ve been a continent shielded by oceans. Carnage known only in Civil War. Foe: Political ideology, not a religion. Our view of the world—challenge we did not ask for in a world we did not make.’ People turn to America. Much grief but many questions. Who is the enemy?”
Little of this made it directly into the final address. “The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows,” Bush would say in his speech. And, “Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking, who attacked our country?”
They worked quickly, falling into one of their grooves. “Tonight we are a country awakened to danger…” That worked. “Freedom is at war with fear.” No, better: “Freedom and fear are at war.” (Later they would add, “and we know that God is not neutral between them.”) Gibson had sent over a memo answering questions about the nature of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Scully: “We’re not deceived by their pretenses to piety.” Gerson: “They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical vision, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of Fascism and Nazism and Imperial Communism.” (“Totalitarianism” would be substituted for “Imperial Communism” lest the Russians be offended.) Scully again: “And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends.” A lull now, as they contemplated where exactly it did end. Then McConnell: “You know, history’s unmarked grave.” Almost. They played with it. “It will end in discarded lies,” McConnell added. Here it was: “And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends, in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
At some point that week, the three men received a contribution they were unaware came from a former White House ghost. Like most Americans in the wake of the attacks, Tom Malinowski, the former chief NSC writer under Clinton, wanted to help the president. “We were all Americans after 9/11,” he said. “And our president was not doing so well—which people tend to forget—rhetorically.” After a hesitant performance on September 11 itself, Bush had lurched tonally. He referred to the terrorists as “folks” and then called for a “crusade”—a heretical word in the Muslim world—and said that al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden was “wanted, dead or alive.” “Bush Negotiates a Rhetorical Minefield” was the headline of one Washington Post story. The president’s father told him to rein in his tone.
Malinowski tried to help the way he knew best: He wrote up a page and a third of suggested lines for the speech and sent them to John Gibson, his old NSC colleague. “One tough line: ‘We will bring them to justice, or we will bring justice to them. But there will be justice.’ [A bit loftier than ‘dead or alive,’ but it means the same thing!]” Malinowski had written at the top of the first page.
“Now for the squishy, but vital part,” he added, continuing with more suggested sound bites. Gibson passed on the “justice” line—but did not say where he had gotten it. The fact of its origin might have disqualified it. “There’s nothing wrong about it: one of your jobs as a White House speechwriter is to solicit ideas,” Malinowski said. “The president is entitled to the best stuff.” The troika liked the “justice” line and included it. The draft they submitted to Bush on Monday night was rough, but it was serviceable, and it was in by 8 pm, if not by seven.
The speechwriters and Hughes met with the president the next morning in the Oval Office. He was not satisfied with the speech, particularly the peroration. The writers suggested including a Franklin Roosevelt quote—“We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind”—but Bush was not interested. “I don’t want to quote anyone!” he said. “I want to lead! I want to be the guy they quote!” He did not want to close on a note of introspection but of leadership. “This is what my presidency is about,” he said more than once.
Rice walked in with an ultimatum that Secretary of State Colin Powell was going to issue to the Taliban, the fundamentalist Muslims who controlled Afghanistan and were allied with al Qaeda. They must hand over any al Qaeda leaders and shut down any terrorist camps there, Powell planned to say. Bush liked those demands. He decided to announce them himself in his speech.
As Gerson pulled into his driveway that night at around 9:30 pm, his cell phone rang. It was the president, with more changes. They were heading in the right direction, he said. They spent about thirty minutes line-editing the speech, as Gerson sat in his car.
“You all have smiles on your faces, that’s good,” Bush said the next day, when Hughes and the speechwriters met with him at 1 pm. He was feeling loose, feet up on his desk. When he read through the latest draft of the speech, he even parodied a couple of lines that did not work. A Hughes line that analogized al Qaeda to the Mafia—al Qaeda is to Arabs what the Mafia is to Italians—gave him pause (“Isn’t that kind of a slight ethnic insult?”), but he kept it. He was, overall, pleased. “Let’s call the Congress,” he said—he would address the joint session the next evening, Thursday, September 20.
There had been some discussion about the setting for the speech: Congress? A war college? Some aides had favored another Oval Office speech, but Bush generally preferred speaking on his feet—he was uncomfortable at a desk. Rove had argued for the Congress. Bush fed off crowds and it would help build national unity. The president’s key political adviser, Rove had come from Texas with him and had been dubbed “Bush’s Brain.” His direction carried a great deal of weight on speech matters. He would notice if some policy pronouncement differed from Bush’s previous statements going back years. And on major speeches he would send in long handwritten memos explaining his edits. “Karl is a very serious thinker, and not just a political strategist but as a policy theorist,” Gerson later said.
Bush ambled into the family theatre that night at 6:30 pm, wearing a blue tracksuit and a baseball cap for his first podium rehearsal of the speech. The atmosphere was informal. Spot, his dog, ran around the room. He again made fun of lines that were overwrought. (Mocking overwritten speech language was standard for Bush in rehearsal. On another occasion when the speechwriters gave him baroque lines about spreading freedom around the globe, he paused, looked up, and said, “What is this stuff? I sound like Spartacus or someone.”) He cut others that did not fit—it was not the time for something like “This crisis found us making progress on many fronts, from education to energy policy.” “Take it out,” he ordered. He complained to Hughes that she was allowing too many inserts without his knowledge. “I probably rejected a hundred suggestions for every one we took,” she protested. “Well, you took too many,” he replied. He inserted “After all” into the start of a sentence about the United States being the largest source of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan—a pause there would allow him to take a breath. He came to the end of the speech, where he would hold up the police badge of New York City Police Officer George Howard. “And I will carry this,” Bush said, picking up a bottle of Dasani water. “It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others.”
The president met with his war cabinet at 7 pm. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was concerned that singling out bin Laden would elevate the terrorist in stature. Rice said that the decision had been made—he would be named once. (Al Qaeda “and its leader, a person named Usama bin Laden, are linked to many other organizations in different countries,” Bush would say, warning that there were “thousands of these terrorists in more than sixty countries.”)
Bush had a second practice session at 11:10 am on Wednesday, September 20. He was wearing a suit, and was a bit more grave. At the third and final rehearsal, that afternoon, there was a different air in the family theatre, it seemed to Scully, and a new man reading the speech. For the first time, Bush brought the speech to life. This time, when he came to the “And I will carry this” line, he pulled out the actual badge. Logan Walters,
Bush’s personal aide, asked him if he wanted to read it through once more. “No,” the president said. “I’m ready.”
That night, the president made a rare appearance before a joint session of Congress without the vice president sitting behind him. To underscore security, Cheney was kept away from the Capitol,* as was House majority leader Richard Armey—though there were likely few places in the country that night more secure than that building. Fighter jets and military helicopters circled overhead. Barriers of concrete and wire blocked the approaches. Police and soldiers massed outside while bomb-sniffing dogs checked the galleries around the House chamber. A fleet of ambulances, fire trucks, and unmarked SWAT vans awaited any contingency. “The Capitol looked as if it had suddenly been moved to Beirut, or Mogadishu,” The Washington Post reported.
As Laura Bush walked to her seat in the gallery, accompanied by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and New York governor George Pataki, the assembled legislators burst into thunderous applause, with shouts of “Bravo!” The two New York leaders seemed taken aback by the welcome. Bush was greeted as a conquering hero, with bipartisan whoops and unceasing applause.
“In the normal course of events, Presidents come to this Chamber to report on the state of the Union. Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people,” he began. “Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution.” (This was an example of the speechwriters giving Bush back a polished version of what he had been telling them, as was the sentence, “We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.”)
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