I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it's always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there.
A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.
The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound... These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.
The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?
Convention speeches are powerful tools to bend the curve of public opinion. George H. W. Bush's 1988 convention speech is a great example. His son's speech was also quite powerful.
I am neither a writer nor a theorist. For a person who creates things to utter too many words means to regulate himself - a frightening prospect.
When words I uttered, believing them to be true, were exposed as false, I was constrained by my duties and loyalty to the President and unable to comment. But I promised reporters and the public that I would someday tell the whole story of what I knew.
In the Reagan administration, a great speech was just the first step in a long process. In the Obama administration, it's the only step.
Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.
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