Confessions
of a presidential speechwriter
If
Jean-Claude Juncker goes off script in this week’s State of the
Union, spare a thought for the poor soul who put the speech together.
By
Ryan Heath
9/13/16, 5:30 AM CET
A little over five
years ago, I gave up my job as a British civil servant and a place in
the U.K. immigration line to take a job as a speechwriter for José
Manuel Barroso, then president of the European Commission.
It was an honor to
join the president’s team — that word “president” was so hard
to say no to. In my mind’s eye, I was already striding purposefully
from meeting to meeting, pen in hand, ready to project European
leadership on the Arab Spring, help save the eurozone, and nail the
holy grail of speechwriting: a State of the Union speech.
But as we began work
on the speech, the European equivalent of the U.S. president’s
address to Congress, I discovered that reality was less “West Wing”
and more “The Office.”
The idea behind the
State of the Union speech was to combine a rallying cry for Europe
with to-do lists for the EU institutions. Barroso had given the first
one the year before, delivering an address that had lacked everything
a speechwriter aims for: glamor, brevity, levity and legitimacy. The
writers knew it, and had shared their concern with communication
colleagues across the Commission.
This year was going
to be different — or so we told ourselves.
The drafting process
got underway in May, when a group of four officials convened to begin
research for this unnamed project.
What he was
looking for — if he expressed it to anyone — was never
communicated to me. It felt like writing for a black box.
Beyond me, the group
included Commission Secretary-General Catherine Day, Barroso’s head
of cabinet Johannes Laitenberger and the head of the Spokespersons’
Service, Koen Doens. Other Barroso speechwriters as well as the head
of the president’s think tank and a former MEP, Margaritis Schinas
— now the Commission spokesperson — joined later meetings.
When I’d drafted
something, I would file it in the system where it would ping-pong
between top officials. Barroso himself didn’t appear at our
meetings, except once, and then only briefly. What he was looking for
— if he expressed it to anyone — was never communicated to me. It
felt like writing for a black box. Once in a while, someone would
come back to me with critiques or suggestions, but it was unclear if
any of it came from Barroso.
Still, I consoled
myself that Barroso at least allowed the existence of speechwriters.
His foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, refused such support,
preferring to jot her first draft of history in bullet points en
route to the podium.
Plenary session at
the European Parliament
Former President of
the European Commission José Manuel Durão Barroso (R) with former
European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine
Ashton (L) during the plenary session of the European Parliament in
Strasbourg, France, September 28 2011| Christophe Karabe/EPA
* * *
Effective
speechwriting is a fine balance between drafting and inspiration.
Winging it doesn’t work for most speakers, but neither does
overplanning.
“If you hit on the
story too soon in the process, you destroy it in the end,” says
Vincent Stuer, who worked on Barroso’s 2013 State of the Union
speech. “It means you rewrite it so many times that even the best
speech will get ruined. Catching the story is not the thing. Getting
it safely to harbor is the key.”
Stuer’s advice is
simple: “There should be maximum of three people holding the pen.
If you don’t get that right, it will always be crap at the end.”
Team Barroso in 2011
had well over half a dozen pen-holders.
Indeed, there were
so many meetings, with so many different groupings of people, that at
least 16 versions of the speech were produced before the president
even read one.
To help overcome
Barroso’s reluctance to focus on the speech — to be fair, he was
quite busy helping hold the eurozone together that summer — his
main advisers agreed that I could accompany him to Australia and New
Zealand in early September, three weeks before the big speech, in
order to pin him down for his thoughts.
My mission was an
unmitigated disaster.
One low point
came towards the end of the trip when, after Barroso gave a speech at
a casino in Auckland to Pacific Island leaders, the motorcade left
without me
Barroso had little
time for me. He stayed by himself in his first-class cabin, relegated
me to the rear car of the motorcade and left me begging his security
detail to slip drafts under his hotel room door.
One low point came
towards the end of the trip when, after Barroso gave a speech at a
casino in Auckland to Pacific Island leaders, the motorcade left
without me. Clutching his discarded cue cards, I walked back alone to
the hotel along the city’s hilly streets.
Barroso either
willfully ignored me or didn’t seem to know what I was there for.
* * *
Turned out, getting
noticed would be worse. That same trip, in the VIP lounge at
Singapore airport, I tried to corner Barroso on the speech but he
didn’t want to talk. He instead wanted me to research links between
his family and a wine region in Australia called the Barossa Valley.
There being no such link, I produced a list of “10 things you don’t
know about Australia” to distract and amuse him. He was not amused.
Plenary session at
the European Parliament
José Manuel Barroso
delivering his speech about economic crisis and the Euro at the
European Parliament during a plenary session in Strasbourg, France,
September 14, 2011| Christophe Karaba/EPA
Left alone in the
VIP suite as Barroso met with the Singaporean prime minister in
another suite, I thought there was no point in writing yet another
draft of the speech. So I decided instead to a take a bath in
Barroso’s private bathroom, the only one available, to refresh
after the 12-hour flight from Europe. There was just one problem:
After I was done, the bathtub refused to drain.
I desperately called
in hotel staff, trying to express in the strongest possible terms
that the water had to leave the bathtub. We failed, and Barroso
returned to a tub full of soapy bathwater.
For four months, I
had seen people come and go from the core speechwriting group,
invited and disinvited from meetings, as they came in and out of
favor.
This time, it was my
turn be disinvited to the next State of the Union meeting. I returned
to Brussels empty-handed and Barroso never spoke to me again. I was
left to tweet bits from the televised speech from inside my gray
Brussels office until my boss eventually put me out of my misery and
told me to find another job.
So, on Wednesday, if
you hear Jean-Claude Juncker going off-script in the 2016 State of
the Union or see a young suited figure grimace at the edge of the
stage — spare a thought for them. That could be a lonely
speechwriter, wondering whether they’ll ever get it right.
Ryan Heath, senior
EU correspondent at POLITICO, writes the Brussels Playbook. He has
written two books, including “Please Just F* Off, It’s Our Turn
Now,” and was speechwriter for Barroso and former Commission
Vice-President Neelie Kroes.
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