Presidential speechwriters should be anonymous, never known, and they should take an oath never to write kiss-and-tell books about their bosses. It’s just unseemly.
One of President Bush’s speechwriters has written a book in which he makes everyone in the White House look stupid, except himself and except Donald Rumsfeld (who coincidentally is paying that same speechwriter to help write Rumsfeld’s memoirs).
In today’s Wall Street Journal, William McGurn, who hired speechwriter Matt Latimer for Bush, gives Latimer a little of what Latimer’s book dishes out.
Matt neglects to mention that personnel took away his West Wing cubby when they needed space for someone more important. Or that he spent the next few weeks knocking on every door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, looking for a room sufficiently grand to display his large and ever-expanding collection of framed testimonials to himself.
Ditto for Air Force One. Yes, he was on it, but not because he was important. To the contrary, I put him on it because he was failing. At one point in the book, he admits that he “never felt the connection” he was supposed to feel with the president. Bringing him into the Oval and getting him on Air Force One was a (losing) attempt on my part to get the president to warm up to him. These are distasteful things to have to say publicly about someone who once worked for you. And I would have taken them to the grave had Matt not used these props and the snippets of conversation he picked up to paint a highly distorted view of some very good people during some very tough times. …
In fairness, it’s not all yucks. On the day Mr. Rumsfeld resigns, Matt recounts a scene in the Defense secretary’s office. “You were my star,” (emphasis in the original) he tells Matt. “And, uh, I probably never told you that.” Right there in the secretary”s office, Matt reports, “I started to cry.’”
Right there too we see Mr. Bush’s greatest failing: Never did he look into young Matthew’s moist eyes and tell him, “You are my star.” If he only had we would have a very different book.
Looking bad. Today, more readers probably saw McGurn’s skewering of Latimer than will ever see Latimer’s book. Latimer asked for it.
Frank Warner
Comments