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Australia

The unseen art of political ventriloquism

Tom Switzer

Wednesday, 5th November 2008

Most senior politicians are too busy to write long articles and speeches all by themselves, says Tom Switzer

Nor is speechwriting merely an Australian phenomenon. The two most memorable US presidential inaugural addresses of the 20th century were Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1933 and John F. Kennedy’s in 1961. Neither was exclusively the product of the speaker. In FDR’s case (‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’), it was the combined work of Louis Howe and Sam Rosenman. And JFK’s address (‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’) was principally written by his adviser Ted Sorensen, who also drafted Kennedy’s Pulitizer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage. A substantial part of Sorensen’s new memoirs are dedicated to — wait for it — writing speeches for a president.

The columnist Peggy Noonan — think of the speech to mark the loss of space shuttle Challenger and its crew in January 1986 — was the most influential wordsmith for the Great Communicator. David Frum broke his anonymity and boasted that he wrote George W. Bush’s post-9/11 address, in which he warned: ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ And Barry Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative was written by Brent Bozell, and his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention was so polarising (‘Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice! Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue’ — later revealed as a paraphrase of a passage from Cicero) that the real author, Karl Hess, joined the New Left.

Of course, not all modern-day political speeches and articles are ghost-written. During the decade I was a newspaper opinion editor, I published hundreds of politicians’ articles. Most were written by offsiders; but notable exceptions come to mind: Tony Abbott, Tony Smith and Malcolm Turnbull on the Liberal side, and Lindsay Tanner, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd on the Labor side. Uninspiring though he is as a public speaker, the PM wrote his own op-eds when he was a relentlessly self-promoting opposition backbencher.

The truth, though, is that most senior politicians don’t write their own work, and those who do the ghost-writing are often very proud of their copy. Consider this: in 1995, a former speechwriter revealed he was the author of a memorable address by a Liberal leader. ‘I wrote [Andrew] Peacock’s 1983 Deakin Lecture and I’ve heard people quote that lecture endlessly since,’ he lamented. ‘When I hear them, I think, “Little do they know they’re quoting me.” Some of them would be appalled if they knew. Nevertheless, Peacock signed off on it and that goes down in history as Peacock’s work, not my work.’ The aggrieved writer: Alexander Downer.