***Special Wordpaths Alert***

Go to nytimes.com and read From Books, New President Found Voice. Or don't -- just sit quietly and think about these two excerpts: 

Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power "to transform": "with the right words everything could change...

And...

As Fred Kaplan's illuminating new biography ("Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer") makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading... Both men...use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln's case, Mr. Kaplan notes, "The tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him." 

Bush & Noonan

George H. W. Bush had provided a list of words to Peggy Noonan as she was preparing his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Among the words were "kindness," "caring," "decency," and "heart." Noonan turned them into a sentence: "I wanted a kinder nation." Bush penciled in "gentler." 

That's it! That's how this work gets done! (1) The speaker does a brain dump on you. (2) You organize the thoughts into sentences and paragraphs. (3) The speaker makes them his or her own. It's an Oreo cookie, and the writer is the filling. 

Kinder/gentler came back in the inaugural address. Knowing that it's coming, we can appreciate what happens a few sentences before...

No President, no government, can teach us to remember what is best in what we are. But if the man you have chosen to lead this government can help make a difference; if he can celebrate the quieter, deeper successes that are made not of gold and silk, but of better hearts and finer souls; if he can do these things, then he must.

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world.

Did you see it, the foreshadowing? Before "kinder/gentler," they gave us "quieter/deeper" and  "better/finer." But not just that. There were the less obvious dualities of "no President, no government," "gold and silk," "hearts and souls," "if he can, then he must." And then, they play the variation on the theme set forth in the convention speech, where Bush had said:

I want a kinder, and gentler nation. 

Now, in the inaugural, they give us, the listeners, full credit for knowing the straightforward "I want..." expression of kinder/gentler from the convention, and they treat us to this variation that is actually what it speaks of -- it's a kinder, gentler development of its antecedent: "to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world." 

Reagan & ... uh, Reagan

A few days ago, nytimes.com posted a video feature entitled Inaugurations in Times of Peril. In it was a piece of the closing of Ronald Reagan's first inaugural, in which he told us we had to believe we could overcome the perils ahead, concluding with the line: "And after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are Americans." 

What was the inspiration for that remark? Robert Schlesinger says it was Reagan himself, who  "had a Hollywood thought":

There was a World War II movie about Bataan*, he told Khachigian and image adviser Michael Deaver, in which an actor named Frank McHugh said something like, "We're Americans. What's happening to us?" Khachigian spun this thought into a line in his first draft -- "We have great deeds to do.... But do them we will. We are after all Americans" -- which in turn evolved into the delivered speech's closing...

The rest of the speech was inspired by ... well, Reagan. Again, Schlesinger:

Reagan had handed Khachigian a six-inch-high stack of four-by-six index cards from his speeches over the years. In a sense, though, he had given one speech over his entire career...what came to be known as "The Speech" -- his standard statement of a philosophy that favored country and business and opposed government and communism....Khachigian had sent Reagan a batch of memos with suggestions for the inaugural, but the president-elect had hardly glanced at them. He wanted themes from The Speech and from his 1967 inaugural address as governor of California, a speech he had written by hand...

*By the way, if you can find a movie about Bataan in which Frank McHugh said anything, let me know--Bill Seyle

Carter & Fallows

"Carter thinks in lists, not arguments," James Fallows wrote after having stepped in at age 27 as Jimmy Carter's speechwriter. Sure enough, Carter's inaugural address closed like this:

Within us, the people of the United States, there is evident a serious and purposeful rekindling of confidence. And I join in the hope that when my time as your President has ended, people might say this about our Nation:

-- that we had remembered the words of Micah and renewed our search for humility, mercy, and justice;

-- that we had torn down the barriers that separated those of different race and region and religion, and where there had been mistrust, built unity, with a respect for diversity;

-- that we had found productive work for those able to perform it;

-- that we had strengthened the American family, which is the basis of our society;

-- that we had ensured respect for the law, and equal treatment under the law, for the weak and the powerful, for the rich and the poor;

-- and that we had enabled our people to be proud of their own Government once again.

I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, built not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values.

These are not just my goals, and they will not be my accomplishments, but the affirmation of our Nation's continuing moral strength and our belief in an undiminished, ever-expanding American dream.

Nixon & Price (Kissinger too)

From the Nixon chapter of Robert Schlesinger's White House Ghosts: Presidents and their Speechwriters:

Richard Nixon and Raymond Price finished working on the inaugural address at around midnight on Saturday, January 18, in Nixon's Pierre Hotel suite in New York City. Nixon split a bottle of Heineken with his speechwriter and put his feet up on the desk. "Only the short ones are remembered," he had told Price. "Lincoln's second was a great one -- Theodore Roosevelt's was damn good, even though it came in the middle of his presidency. Wilson's was very good, and FDR's first. Kennedy's basically stands up because it has some good phrases, and because it caught the mood and it caught himself." 

Quoting from Price's book, With Nixon, Schlesinger tells us that Henry Kissinger had submitted a couple of sentences he had negotiated with Soviet representatives. They read:

To those who, for most of the postwar period, I have opposed and, occasionally, threatened us, I repeat what I have already said: let the coming years be a time of negotiation rather than confrontation. During this administration the lines of communication will always be open. 

Translated into speech cadences, those lines became: 

"After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation. Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open."

Kennedy & Sorensen

Ted Sorensen was the first appointee announced in John F. Kennedy's administration. As JFK's closest advisor, he was busy with the transition in addition to working on a first draft of the inaugural address. 

In White House Ghosts: Presidents and their Speechwriters, Robert Schlesinger reports that Kennedy told Sorensen to "solicit suggestions," "keep it short" and "read previous inaugurals." He also assigned the Gettysburg Address, "tasking Sorensen with ferreting out the secret of its genius." Sorensen concluded that "Lincoln never used a two- or three-syllable word where a one-syllable word would do, and never used three words where one word would do."

When writing for JFK...

"Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman's care to whatever the situation required, Sorensen noted. Soft words and phrases -- "suggest," "perhaps," and "possible alternatives for consideration" -- were avoided. Short words and clauses were the order, with simplicity and clarity the goal. And while the summoning trumpets of the inaugural address have linked Kennedy in the public mind with flowery prose, he generally shunned rhetorical excess. 

Lincoln & Seward

William H. Seward offered a paragraph to Abraham Lincoln as a suggested conclusion to Lincoln's first inaugural address. Seward attended the inauguration not knowing how much of his paragraph had made it into the final draft. This is how Gore Vidal presented the scene in his historical novel, Lincoln:

Lincoln resumed his speech. As he came to the coda, Seward leaned forward, eager to hear what Lincoln had cut from his own speech and what of Seward's paragraph he had used....

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords..." 

Seward, eyes shut, chanted softly his own original phrase: "The majestic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths..." Tears came to Seward's eyes whenever he declaimed this particular passage, first tried out many years ago at Utica. But Lincoln had changed the language. With some irritability, Seward heard the trumpet-voice intone the new "mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."