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| What it Takes to Write Obama's Big |
| What it Takes to Write Obama's Big Speech (Single Malt Helps)
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 20-January-2015
13:4:17 PM |
| One night last week Cody Keenan, the chief White House speechwriter President Barack Obama has christened "Hemingway," knew he needed help.
Keenan had spent 15 days holed up in a hotel room in Honolulu as the president vacationed nearby, and seven more in a windowless office in the basement of the West Wing trying to turn a blank computer screen into a 6,000-word State of the Union first draft. The lonesome process had finally gotten to him.
So the burly 34-year-old former high school quarterback left his White House office and trudged in the freezing rain to the nearby apartment of one of his closest friends in the administration, Benjamin J. Rhodes.
It was after midnight, but Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser and the writer of many of the president's foreign policy speeches, was up reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" to his 4-week-old daughter. The two men poured two single-malt Scotch whiskies, and with the baby resting quietly, began triage on Keenan's prose. By 5 a.m., a more succinct draft was on its way to the president.
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"You're alone in a room writing for so many days by yourself, and you eventually need someone to talk to," Rhodes said. "A single-malt Scotch can also help."
On Tuesday, Obama will deliver his next-to-last State of the Union address from a text written, rewritten, revised and sweated over by Keenan. In all the policy pronouncements about tax increases on the rich and tax cuts for the middle class, Obama's remarks are certain to address the struggles of ordinary Americans in some of the gritty, Everyman prose that has become Keenan's trademark.
"He reminds me of some of the folks I grew up with in the old days in Chicago journalism - those hard-bitten,
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