The Role of US Presidential Speechwriters

The US President’s speechwriter is a term that originated in the English language during 1825–35. It remained an informal and often invisible role during the first century of the Union. Biographer Ron Chernow has documented Alexander Hamilton as General George Washington’s speechwriter. Every American president from Washington on down had an acknowledged speechwriter—except Abraham Lincoln, to date.

(Who Are the Inaugural Poets for United States Presidents?)

The role of the presidential speechwriter changed dramatically across the 150 years between Abraham Lincoln’s presidency down to Barack Obama’s presidency, even while Obama often shadowed Lincoln’s rhetoric. Through the ages, the presidential speechwriter was not as esteemed as the chief executive’s cabinet ministers. And yet, the role was and is every bit as critical to a president’s diplomatic and popular success.

In the writing of Lincoln’s Speechwriter, John Hay and the Friendship That Inspired American Eloquence, my ambition was to open readers’ minds to the possibility that President Lincoln did not write some of his most important speeches, nor did he have the intellectual capability or time to do so. Before his election, working in the same law offices in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln admired John Hay’s literary talents. He brought him into his inner circle in Washington, DC, to do for him what he was unable to do for himself.

Different from today, John Hay’s speechwriting did not reflect Lincoln’s voice. Rather, Hay’s scrapbooks, diaries, and newspaper articles revealed the certainty of Hay’s own voice, his contribution to Lincoln’s speeches and letters. The discovery of Hay’s role in Lincoln’s major messages, speeches, and letters is based on the written record of Hay’s diary and his anonymous and pseudo-anonymous press filings. It was my reading of Hay’s speeches and poetry written during his college years at Brown and while working with Lincoln in Springfield before his presidency, a reading that established Hay’s literary and poetic patterns. It is also based on major changes in Lincoln’s oratory after Hay began working with the president-elect during 1859–1860.

I immersed myself in John Hay’s archives—his scrapbooks, diaries, newspaper articles, his published and unpublished writings of poetry, fiction, history, and also his addresses, as well as his college bluebooks and speeches, which no one had read since his children deposited them in the Special Collections archive at Brown University Library in 1939. These documents revealed Hay’s distinct literary voice, discerning Hay’s eloquent rhyme patterns and then those of President Lincoln’s major speeches and letters in the years that followed. Entering Lincoln’s world through the door of Hay scholarship, I had a unique perspective on Hay’s contribution to Lincoln’s prose.

President Barack Obama’s senior speechwriter, Stephen Krupin, explained that his duty as the president’s speechwriter, by contrast to Lincoln and Hay, was to “channel the speaker’s voice.” For Krupin, “that was the way he served his speaker.” His job was “to get as close as possible as what the president would want to say and how he would say it.”

Krupin explained that contemporary speechwriting is not simply “an impression of the President.” Instead, it reflects “how he thinks and how he communicates,” accounting for his “voice, argument, and story.” In the case of Obama, speaking to a divided nation, the speech “lifted up the experience of others,” says Krupin. The President was explaining “who we are as Americans.” This was no small feat for a constitutional lawyer, as Obama was, to “summon our good faith.” Obama used his communication to bridge divides and bring together 300+ million people who disagreed with one another. Obama’s mission, says Krupin, was to disagree without being disagreeable, to bring people together, echoing the voice he had created.

By contrast, Hay’s contribution to Lincoln’s major messages, speeches, and letters reflected Hay’s speeches and poetry. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, editors of Inside the Lincoln White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, wrote “the relationship between Lincoln and Hay resembled that between earlier wartime father-and-son surrogates George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. . . . showing as Hamilton did in similar offices, the tact and common sense which were to serve him as they served Hamilton in wider spheres of public duty.” Hamilton was President Washington’s speechwriter during his second administration.

Probably the most recognized speechwriter in modern times is presidential counselor and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy, Ted Sorensen. Sorensen confirmed the stresses of the Executive office, explaining that President Kennedy lacked the time to plan and draft with full consideration all the statements required of him. Sorensen explained in his memoir, Counselor, that President Kennedy “never pretended...that he had time to draft personally every word of every speech he was required to make virtually every week and ultimately virtually every day. Many historians have it wrong. He did not dictate first drafts for me to polish. Our collaboration was not a secret; nor was it without historical precedent.”

Gary Wills explained in Lincoln at Gettysburg that “Lincoln’s desire for honest literary discussion” drew him to “[become] ever more intimated with Hay.” Reflecting upon their creative process, the word “poetry” stood foremost. It derived from the ancient Greek word poiesis, signaling the act of making. In the classical tradition in which Hay was taught, poetry didn’t refer to the writing of verse. Instead, it was the act of making, of bringing something into being that didn’t before exist. This is exactly what Lincoln and Hay accomplished together.

Mastering the president’s speaking style, Hay internalized Lincoln’s tendency toward reflection, idealism, and principle. Shaping the words that Lincoln wrote and spoke, Hay enhanced it with verse, mythology, classic rhetoric, and romantic impressions of the war, exalting the duty done.

Lincoln fired the ideological torch and moral vision of his presidency as he drafted and dictated notes and memos to secretaries John Hay and George Nicolay, many of which Hay chronicled in his diaries. The words flowed from his pen that had mastered literature and the literary techniques of ancient Greece, the epic Renaissance, and 18th-century English poets. Verbal persuasion, which Hay had advanced to an art form on multiple platforms at Brown, he put into public service as Lincoln’s private wordsmith, rising as a keystone of the Lincoln presidency.

“How did Lincoln, a person with so little formal education, become our most eloquent president?” Lincoln’s Speechwriter answers that riddle without a doubt.

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