Things used to be chummy between Matthew Scully and his former boss, Michael Gerson. Together with John McConnell, the three worked long hours together as George W. Bush’s speechwriters, first on the campaign, and then in the administration.
Somewhere on the way to the White House, a president who was not known for his oratorical gifts, to say the least, began giving widely praised speeches. Gerson, who held the title of chief speechwriter, got much of the credit in media profiles.
But in the September issue of the Atlantic, Scully, who left the White House in August 2004, came forward to say that Gerson was a credit hog, an inveterate self-promoter, and a hypocrite. And he said the press fell for a Gerson-as-genius narrative that Gerson himself cooked up.
Scully makes a vivid anecdotal case that the press simply resorted to “printing the legend” when writing about Gerson. But the job of a political speechwriter is often to spin an emotionally powerful, seemingly airtight case from fairly thin threads. So CJR went back to three of the journalists whose work Scully mentions in his article to get their thoughts on the piece.
At the heart of Scully’s complaint about the press is that when profiling his old boss, journalists would glide over the team’s collaborations and assign credit to Gerson alone. “The three of us,” Scully writes, “spent two of our best days laboring over a speech delivered on Goree Island in West Africa, only to have The New Yorker pronounce it ‘perhaps Gerson’s most extraordinary speech.’”
The author of that New Yorker piece, Jeffrey Goldberg, acknowledges attributing speeches solely to Gerson, even though he very well knew that they were collaborative efforts. “Did Gerson ever say, ‘I and I alone wrote the Goree Island Speech?’ No, of course not,” says Goldberg. He describes the omission as “the sin of shorthand.” To adequately describe the speech-writing process would, he reasons, require a sentence like “the speech was supervised by Michael Gerson and written by Scully and McConnell, and vetted by Andy Card and Karl Rove…”
“I suppose we should be a little more careful about these issues, but at some point, you don’t want to bore your reader.”
Goldberg wrote his piece—which was mostly about Gerson’s later role as an administration anti-poverty and faith-based initiative adviser—after Scully had left the White House. Goldberg says Gerson passed on Scully’s phone number and that he “had nothing but nice things to say about Gerson” during their hour-long conversation.
“It’s a little much for him to say The New Yorker didn’t get the truth when he didn’t tell us,” Goldberg says.
Another reporter who Scully calls out is Chris Bury, who interviewed Gerson in December 2002 for “Up Close,” a short-lived interview program that aired after “Nightline” on ABC. “I actually think it’s a pretty damn good interview,” says Bury. “At the time it was a good get,” especially since the White House wasn’t offering much access.
Bury says that the program was designed to give viewers some “atmosphere” in the run up to the State of the Union speech. For the most part he asked general questions about Gerson’s speech-writing process. Five years later, Scully dissects and sets up Gerson’s responses in ways that make Gerson look like he’s taking credit for work Scully says he didn’t do.
It would be easy to get that impression from the segment. Bury plays a clip of the president speaking, and then asks Gerson about the words. When Bury directly asks if Gerson wrote a particularly famous phrase, Gerson demurs: “Well, I won’t talk about the lines.”
“By its very nature, this program was only about one person at a time,” says Bury, acknowledging that this narrow focus could give the impression of that Gerson was solely responsible for Bush’s words. “In Washington, everyone can’t always get credit. Senators’ staffers don’t get credit for writing the bills.
“We’ve got to tell stories in the most compelling way, and sometimes storylines are clearer with just one person. It’s a time-honored way of doing journalism,” he says.
But it’s not the way that D.T. Max told his story. As a writer for The New York Times Magazine, Max was working on a piece about Bush’s speech-writing operation in the early days of the administration. After September 11, he decided to focus the piece on a single speech, Bush’s September 20 address to Congress. It was the only piece of journalism that Scully praised in his Atlantic article.
“My impression going in was that I’d be writing about Gerson,” says Max. “I’d been seeing all this material that made Gerson out to be a genius, a second coming of Ted Sorenson. That’s what my editors and I had expected. It very, very, quickly became clear that the myth of Gerson was not accurate… It was pretty clear that it was a team, and that Gerson functioned as the manager on the team.”
Max says he spent six months working on the piece, making over fifteen visits to the White House, and assembling a color-coded chart matching key phrases from the speech with their author.
In the end Max wrote a highly-detailed account of a team of professionals assembling a speech. Gerson is there, but he isn’t alone. Among the five-person speech-writing team (Scully, McConnell, and two others) and sundry advisers (including Karen Hughes, Richard Clarke, and Karl Rove) Gerson seems, at most, a first among equals.
Max’s story had the misfortune to be published on the day the U.S. began air strikes in Afghanistan. Max says that may be one reason that it failed—despite being the most comprehensive account of how a Bush speech was written—to change the way the press thought about Gerson.
But Max thinks there’s at least one other likely possibility: “There’s such a wide cultural assumption of a single creator,” he says.
Authors and readers want to believe that one lonely writer is responsible for great works. And profiles inevitably enhance their subject at the expense of those who worked alongside that person.
But too much of the reporting on Gerson failed to convey his true role and the nature of how Bush’s speeches were created. Yes, Scully’s article has the smell of sour grapes, and given the magnitude of other stories emanating from this White House, a tiff over speech-writing credit seems a little beside the point. Still, audiences deserved a fuller truth, not tidy, lionizing myths.
Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.