Excerpt from White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters by Robert Schlesinger ($30, Simon & Schuster, 2008).

They should not have been surprised. Clinton speeches were often a dialogue: He could read a crowd and adjust accordingly, seamlessly de­parting and returning to the prepared text. The analogy most Clinton speechwriters use is a jazz musician. "The job of the speechwriters, es­pecially on the domestic side, but also on the foreign policy side, was to try to establish what the main theme was and give him then the freedom to riff," National Security Council (NSC) speechwriter Tony Blinken said.

And jazz does not mean chaos or randomness, argued Don Baer, a Clinton chief speechwriter. Jazz is a "very structured, disciplined form ... But it is the very structure and discipline that actually allows it to have the appearance of spontaneity and to open the door for the emotional component to sort of breathe through where otherwise you might not feel it," he said. "Riffing is not just free and easy--there's a purpose and a direction to it ... It's controlled in such a way that you lose sight of the controls."

Michael Waldman and Gene Sperling cheered during the 1993 State of the Union, but the president's speechwriters were often exasperated when he dis­carded a text that they had toiled over. Clinton knew it was frustrating too, once telling Terry Edmonds, his last chief speechwriter, that it was just his style and that he did it with his own writing. "It's when he gets up there, he sees people he knows, stories come to his mind, connec­tions are being made from past experiences," Edmonds said. "So then he's off, he's off doing his own thing. He uses the speech, of course he knows the policy nugget that's in there, he studies it and makes sure he gets it out. But he'll do it in his own style."

Clinton's speechwriters would eventually learn to boldface the cru­cial talking points in a speech so that the president would include them. Mostly he did, though if he thought a sentence too rhetorical or too banal he might skip or rephrase it. Speechwriter Jordan Tamagni called this the "that's the way the cookie falls apart syndrome," for how he would interpolate a hoary phrase like "that's the way the cookie crum­bles."

Returning to the White House on the evening of Feb. 17, after the State of the Union, Clinton told Paul Begala to bring "the kids," as he called the younger staffers, to the solarium in the residence for a cele­bration. Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting was served, and then cherry pie. At evening's end, Bill and Hillary turned on a C-SPAN rerun of the speech.

National security adviser Anthony Lake and his deputy, Sandy Berger, fought to get a foreign policy speech onto the schedule. Each had speechwriting backgrounds, and they placed great stock in the impor­tance of presidential communication. Lake had written drafts for the NSC under Nixon before he resigned in protest over the 1970 invasion of Cambodia. They had recruited Jeremy Rosner as an NSC speechwriter. Rosner had worked for Gary Hart, and at the Democratic Lead­ership Council. He had helped with national security speeches during the campaign, and was "a tremendous writer with force and punch," Don Baer said. Speeches are written by the White House speechwriting shop, Rosner pointed out to Lake. Not anymore, Lake replied. He told Rosner to tell Kusnet that the NSC would be handling national security speeches.

Rosner and Kusnet had worked closely on the 1984 Mondale cam­paign. When Rosner told Kusnet that national security speeches would be written in the National Security Council, Kusnet just looked at him, and said, OK. "And that was it," Rosner recalled. "It was the biggest turf grab in White House history. It was huge."

NSC staffers had long produced initial drafts for presidential speechwriters, and this writer-expert relationship had always been strained. Henry Kissinger with Nixon and Zbigniew Brzezinski with Carter had both suggested bringing foreign policy speeches entirely in­side the NSC. Now Lake had done it. "The reason for doing this was simply efficiency," Lake recalled. It made sense to have the speeches drafted "in the NSC by a speechwriter who knows the substance of for­eign policy so that you're not then getting behind and trying to fight over nuances."

Lake and Berger finally got a foreign policy speech scheduled for Feb. 26, when Clinton was to speak on globalization and econom­ics, leading up to the push to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), at American University's centennial celebration. Rosner sent several drafts to Clinton and got little response. That morning, Rosner, Lake and Berger joined a scrum in the Oval Office to go over the speech. Things were running late. Clinton was not working from the most recent draft, so Rosner gave the president pages from the current version. The two versions got jumbled. Rosner was panicking. During the campaign, he had never dealt with Clinton in person. Then an aide told Clinton that it was time to leave for American University. Come on Jeremy, Clinton said, get in the car.

The motorcade wound along the Rock Creek Parkway. Pages from the two drafts, covered with Clinton's scribble, were everywhere. The president, eyeglasses down on his nose, edited. What was that line we wanted to add? We should move this section over here. Which of these pages is from the new draft? Rosner answered while holding Clinton's coffee cup as the car traveled a well-worn February road. Oh my God, he thought, the speech is screwed up, we're about to hit a pothole, and I'm going to spill coffee on the president and lose my job. It occurred to him that it was his son's third birthday. Even if he avoided scalding the president, he was sure the speech was doomed: Clinton had not focused on the substance, which was still all over the place.

Rosner did not spill the coffee but watched with trepidation as Clin­ton took the jumble of papers to the podium and told the crowd an an­ecdote about his Georgetown University days and dating a girl from American University. Then he launched into the speech. "It was per­fect," Rosner recalled. "He ad-libbed some sections, he found the key paragraphs. And it was this gorgeous speech ... much better than any­thing we wrote."

Evoking memories of JFK's peace speech at the same school 30 years earlier, in which he appealed for peace on the grounds that "We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal," Clinton said that managing globalization was the major challenge of the age and that the United States could not withdraw from a post-Cold War world. "Washington can no longer remain caught in the death grip of gridlock, governed by an outmoded ideology that says change is to be resisted, the status quo is to be preserved," he said. "Will we repeat the mistakes of the 1920s or the 1930s by turning inward, or will we repeat the successes of the 1940s and the 1950s by reaching outward and improving ourselves as well? I say that if we set a new direction at home, we can set a new direction for the world as well."

Rosner felt calmer about the whole process on April 1, when the same last-minute scene unfolded. Clinton was scheduled to lunch with midshipmen at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and then speak to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on his plans for dealing with Russia in a post-Cold War world. Again the NSC had sent drafts in to the president and had got little response. Once again Rosner ended up in the presidential limousine, this time with Lake as well, try­ing to put the final touches on the speech. Clinton held his own coffee cup, clutching it in his teeth as he rewrote.

Then the car hit a bump and the coffee spilled down the front of Clinton's shirt. Oh man! Clinton yelled. What am I going to do? This is my first visit to a military academy and my shirt is ruined! He instructed the Secret Service to divert the motorcade into Annapolis to stop at a department store, and was informed that this sort of security nightmare was impossible. Lake offered Clinton the shirt off his own back, but the president declined--his national security adviser was too small. The Secret Service agents radioed up and down the motorcade until an agent whose shirt size matched Clinton's was found. At a hastily arranged stop, the president donned the agent's shirt in the back of his limousine.