Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Speeches and sausage-making

A hit piece in the Atlantic [$] by the former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully on his boss, the highly lauded former head speechwriter Michael Gerson, has focused attention on certain behind-the-scenes aspects of Presidential phrasecraft: A team of writers labors in a room for weeks, batting phrases around and exchanging drafts. But after the President gives his address, the press credits the chief speechwriter alone, ignoring how many monkeys banged on those keyboards. Scully argues that Gerson assiduously encouraged that oversimplification.

(I'd love to hear the reaction of the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, who has been effusive about Gerson in recent years, giving him full credit for speeches he may not have written.)

Given this brouhaha, it's timely that Peter Robinson, a speechwriter for President Reagan, has just offered an account of the writing of Reagan's famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech, in Berlin, in June 1987.

In Prologue, the magazine of the U.S. National Archives, Robinson depicts himself as a bumbler who slowly felt his way toward a great line. Before drafting the speech, he'd been warned by every imaginable diplomat and national-security expert not to write anything that might provoke Gorbachev. (After all, he was a reformer.) But having heard from West Germans at a dinner party how much they loathed the guard towers and barbed wire dividing their city, he decided to hit the topic of the wall hard.

His first efforts were hardly stirring, in this version of the tale: "In one draft I wrote, 'Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall,'" he writes. ("Bring," he adds, was "the only verb that came to mind.") The second try was "Herr Gorbachev, take down this wall."

The head speechwriter pronounced this "no good" so Robinson went back to his desk. Asked to review a draft, and what he'd like to tell the East Germans who could hear his speech on the radio, Reagan himself singled out "that passage about tearing down the wall. That wall has to come down. That's what I'd like to say to them."

From there, Robinson says, he actually took a few steps backward, at one point putting Reagan's big line in German: "Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf." (One suspects this wouldn't have made Bartlett's.) In the end, Robinson contends, the line "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" -- which State and the NSC protested until minutes before Reagan delivered it-- had many authors, including, not least, Reagan himself, who proved to have an ear for the strong verb.

Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:15 PM

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