Recognize the following?

Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in a desert.

A generation before John Kennedy’s famous “ask not” line, Khalil Gibran spoke those words and the great Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen crafted his boss’ most recognized line based on Gibran’s question.  Sadly, Sorensen passed away today in New York.

While not taking anything away from Sorensen’s greatness, this Gibran incident is a timely reminder that even among great speechwriters, the art of “borrowing” is a time-honored tradition.  (It’s even possible that this former White House speechwriter might have inadvertently borrowed a line or three from a previous president’s remarks while scrambling to finish a last-minute speech during the 1988 campaign.)  Indeed, the late William Safire, a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, used to tell the story of how, frantic to meet a deadline, he “borrowed” the text of a speech given by (as I recall) President Eisenhower.  After Nixon gave the speech, Safire called one of Ike’s aides to admit the transgression.  According to Safire, that aide merely laughed and said that they had taken the section in question from a speech that Calvin Coolidge once gave.

R.I.P., Mr. Sorensen.  Between you and the late William F. Buckley, there’s little doubt that God and St. Peter are thumbing through the dictionary more often.

During the mid-1980s, I was fortunate to work in the White House as a speechwriter to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. This apparently caused Pat Jampol, my wonderful cousin in Charlotte, to ask recently about the genesis of White House speechwriting. “Who was the first President to use one and not write their own,” she asks. “Or in what era did the politicians first employ speechwriters?” Since Pat was kind enough to take me trick-or-treating in Rye, New York when I was about 5, the least I can do is respond with far more information than she probably ever wanted.

The first recorded White House speechwriter was Judson Churchill Welliver during the Harding Administration.  Welliver was a distant relation to the future British Prime Minister, which may suggest literary genius in the DNA. For a couple of generations, White House speechwriters labored in an enforced anonymity that would have impressed Kim Jung Il.  But cracks began in the 1970s, after The New York Times hired William Safire to be the in-house editorial page conservative.  Subsequently, Carter speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg earned prominence at The New Republic, Peggy Noonan went to The Wall Street Journal and now Mike Gerson’s writings grace the pages of The Washington Post.

As to Pat’s other question about Presidents writing their own speeches, most do it well — far better than their speechwriters.  Many times during my years at the White House (where incidentally my office was right below that of Oliver North and Fawn Hall) I’d see photocopies of speech drafts that Ronald Reagan prepared himself in his distinctive longhand on yellow legal pads.

And there’s the rub.  In the end, even a brilliant speechwriter does not a great speech make.

As my Dartmouth colleague Peter Robinson, who wrote for Ronald Reagan at the same time I wrote for “the elder” George Bush, notes, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon all had great speechwriters. Yet they were never called The Great Communicator because they never fully mastered the ability to convey a clearsighted vision to the American people.

Thanks for your interest, Pat.  Hope this helps.