Barton Swaim worked for Gov. Mark Sanford from 2007 to 2010. This article is adapted from his book, The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics. Copyright © 2015 by Barton Swaim. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

In the spring of 2007 I went to work as one of Gov. Mark Sanford’s two speechwriters, my first and only job in politics. A month or two in, I realized that I hadn’t been hired to write well; I’d been hired to write badly—and badly in comically idiosyncratic ways. Eventually I learned to meet the expectations of this extremely difficult man and even enjoy writing badly in a perverse sort of way. I also learned to admire Sanford, not as a boss—nobody could do that—but as a political leader. For all his eccentricities, however, I thought he’d be the last politician in America to fall into a bizarre scandal involving an extramarital affair. And yet, that’s what he told the world had happened on June 24, 2009.

***


About 20 of us sat in the conference room waiting for the boss to walk in. The room was warm and smelled faintly of sweat. A pair of law clerks quietly debated the correct pronunciation of “debacle.” At last Paul, the head of the policy office, asked what the meeting was about. “I think,” June said, “the governor wants to apologize to the staff.” She said it with a wry look, but nobody laughed.

Stewart looked up from a magazine. “He already did that,” he snapped. “He apologized to his mistress, and to his family—.”

“In that order,” Paul said.

Nervous laughter made its way around the room.

“I don’t think we can handle another apology,” Stewart went on, throwing down the magazine. “Because let me tell you, I know what an apology from this governor sounds like, and it ain’t really an apology. It’s more like—.”

He paused.

Someone said, “More like what?”

“I’ll just put it this way. His apologies tend to have an unapologetic tone.”

Another minute passed, and then the governor walked in. All went silent. He sat in the only remaining chair and made jokes with one of the interns.

A week before, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had been openly talked about by influential commentators in New York and Washington as a Republican presidential candidate. His name had been routinely used in conjunction with the terms “principled stand,” “courageous,” “crazy,” “unbalanced” and “interesting.” The party’s biggest donors had begun to call him and to pay him visits. Now, he was the punch line to a thousand jokes; letters demanding his resignation appeared in newspapers; the word “impeachment” circulated through the capital like rumors of an assassination plot.

“How are y’all?” he said. “Wait—don’t answer that.”

More nervous laugher.

“Aahh.” That was his preface to saying anything significant. “Aahh. But that’s why I called you in here. I just wanted to say the obvious, which is the obvious.”

Paul gave me a look of incomprehension.

“I mean, the obvious—which is that I caused the storm we’re now in. And that’s made everything a little more difficult for everybody in here, and for that I want to say the obvious, which is that I apologize. But you know”—he rose up in his seat to an upright posture—“you know, I was telling one of the boys”—the governor had four sons—“this morning. We were up early and I was saying, ‘Look, the sun came up today.’ It’s a beautiful thing to see. And it’s a beautiful thing regardless of the storms of life. Of which this is one.”

People shifted in their seats and glanced at each other questioningly.

“As it happens,” the governor went on, “and before this storm started, I’d been reading Viktor Frankl’s book about being in a concentration camp. And it’s just incredible to me how you can find beauty, you can find reasons to keep going, in the most appalling circumstances. And I just wanted to say to everybody, keep your head up. Keep pushing forward. And let’s not be in the dumps here. The sun came up today. Aahh. We’re not in a concentration camp. So let’s not stay in the dumps. We can’t make much progress on the important things if we’re in the dumps. So if you’re in the dumps, get out. I mean, of the dumps. Get out of the dumps.”

Nobody spoke.

“Aahh. So, anybody want to say anything? Comments? Pearls of wisdom?”

Still no one spoke.

“Okay, well—.”

“Actually I’d like to say something.” That was Stella.

“Okay.”

“I just want to say—. Actually maybe I shouldn’t.”

“No, it’s okay,” the governor smiled, “go ahead.”

“No, I think I won’t.”

“You sure?”

“Mm. Yeah.”

The governor walked out. Stewart, his deputy chief of staff, looked around the room and said, “For those of you who are newer to the office, that was the governor’s version of a pep talk. Do you feel pepped?”

Later that afternoon I asked Stella what she’d been intending to say. She narrowed her eyes and pointed at me. “You know what I was about to say? You really want to know? I was going to say, ‘You know what, governor—maybe what you say is true. Maybe we should be thankful that we’re not in a concentration camp.’ ” You could hear a slight tremor in her voice. “‘And maybe we take the sun rising for granted, and we shouldn’t. But you’re not really the one who should tell us that right now. And if you do say anything, it should be more like Sorry I flushed all your work down the toilet, people. Sorry I made you all a joke. Sorry about your next job interview, the one where you’re going to be brought in as a curiosity and then laughed at.’ ”

“Stella, I wish you had said that.”

She had tears in her eyes.

***

On the morning after the press conference, I woke up and thought I’d had a terrible dream. I know that’s a predictable thing to say, but it’s true. As I slowly realized what had happened, I got up and went to get the paper. I happened to notice on my desk Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Rosa Parks. I’d just started reading it with the intention of finding good speech material—one of a great many efforts that now seemed pointless.

There was to be a cabinet meeting the following morning. Reporters and cameramen were everywhere.

I watched the meeting on television. A few staffers came in to watch. He began with the second of hundreds of apologies. “I let each of you down,” he said to the agency heads present. “And for that I again apologize. But I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching on that front, and what I find interesting is the story of David. And the way in which, aahh, he fell mightily; fell in very, very significant ways, but then picked up the pieces and went from there. And it really began with, first of all, a larger quest that I think is well-expressed in the Book of Psalms, on the notion of humility—humility toward others, humility in one’s own spirit.”

“Did he just compare himself to David?” someone asked.

An hour or so later we were all still there, wondering if we should do any work. Even basic duties seemed pointless. On the news channels talking heads were ridiculing the boss every half hour or so. The papers were full of columns comparing him to other fallen politicians. Suddenly the governor, Stewart, and Nat (another speechwriter) walked in. “Would y’all excuse us please? Except for you,” he said pointing to me.

When the door was closed, the governor said, “Go ahead.”

“Okay, you can’t compare yourself to David,” Nat said.

“I wasn’t comparing myself to David. I was just saying, wwwww, ‘Here’s a guy in the Bible, he did some bad stuff, there were some dire consequences, but he picked up the pieces and went forward.’”

I thought: He can’t describe what he’s done.

“Governor,” Stewart said, in a slightly more deferential tone, “I admit, I don’t know that much about the Bible, and neither do most people out there, but most people have a vague recollection from Sunday school that David killed a giant when he was like ten, wiped out the Philistines, and did a lot of other bad-ass stuff. And I’m pretty sure he’s considered one of the greatest kings in the Old Testament, am I right? Anyhow, definitely one of history’s great men.”

“And he didn’t just commit adultery,” Nat said. “He had the woman’s husband murdered.”

I thought: He also repented.

“Wwwww.” When the governor didn’t know how to begin a question—a question beginning with “What” or “Where”—he often seemed unable to get it out, as if he weren’t fully engaged yet.

“Governor,” Nat said, “I get what you’re trying to say, but now’s not the time to draw comparisons between yourself and the heroes of history.”

“Wwwww.”

“Look, if you—.”

“Okay I get it, I get it,” the governor said. “Bad analogy. So what I need you to do,” he said to me, “is come up with a few examples from the Bible—or from history, or from whatever—that kind of show, you know, how when you’ve made a mess, you do the best you can to clean it up, you make it right the best you can, and you keep going. You don’t just give up.”

“What about Samson?” I suggested, remembering just as I said it that Samson killed himself and a lot of other people to “make it right.”

“Wwwwhatever. Give me five to ten of them. Some stuff to react to.”

***

With bad news breaking every day—calls for the governor’s resignation, his telling the Associated Press that his mistress had been his “soul mate,” the revelation that he had visited her during a state-sponsored trip—the governor became obsessed with lists, which took hours of our time to compile. He wanted a list of opinion writers who had defended him and a list of those who had ridiculed him, another of donors he needed to call to apologize for “letting them down,” still another of Rotary Clubs he hadn’t addressed in more than a year.

“Courson!” he might shout. He meant Senator John Courson. “What’s Courson said about resignation?”

“Uh,” one of us would say.

“Come on! We’ve got to know this. We need a list. Put together a list of every guy upstairs who’s said something publicly about stepping down.”

And off one of us would go—usually it was me—to compile another list. Nat wagered it wouldn’t be long until he demanded a list of all our lists.

Two or three months passed, and slowly I began writing again. Not op-eds or talking points, mainly just letters. There were lots of thank-you letters to write. The mail bin was full of books with titles like The Key to Companionship and Your Life, Your Marriage. Another—this one self-published, it appeared—bore the imposing title Understanding the Devastating Effects of Sex Outside of Marriage.

Among the most severe challenges was the letter to couples newly engaged. The one I used consisted of about 200 words, a cheery and slightly hokey paragraph about the meaning of marriage. (“More than anything, marriage is about commitment.”) Instead of ceasing to send them, as I told the governor would have been the wiser course, he wanted to rewrite the letter and continue the tradition, “but without saying anything weird.”

A little later, when we began once again to send out statements and press releases that had nothing to do with divorce or impeachment, I drafted a release in which it was suggested that “an honest look at the numbers” proved something or other.

“It looks fine,” he said after reading it. “But let’s not use that word ‘honest.’ I’m not really in a position to lecture people about honesty.”

He said it with uncharacteristic sadness, and for a moment I forgave him for everything.

***

By late fall the governor was starting to do events again. I don’t know if I’d gotten better at my job, or if the whole affair had shaken the boss so badly that he’d forgotten how much he hated my writing, but he seemed oftener now to take what I gave him without much impatience. Occasionally, though, he couldn’t be satisfied. Once, he was to speak at the grand opening of a manufacturer of electric buses.

When I walked into his office to go over the event with him, he didn’t look at me.

“What?” he said, as if to the wall.

“The TerraPax event’s tomorrow. That’s the company that makes electric buses. Have you looked over the stuff I put in the speech book?”

“No. What do you have?” he replied, looking at various things on his desk but not at me.

I handed him another copy. He looked over what I’d written, but I had the feeling he wasn’t seeing it. He just mumbled, “This is stupid … Stupid … I don’t get it … Who cares … Boring.” At last he looked up at me, and I could see his eyes were bloodshot. “Here’s the situation,” he said, “none of this is interesting. I need something that’s moving, something—I don’t know. I mean, what is this?” He read out a fragment or two; he was working up to a rant. “You’re a bright guy. Get me something interesting. About the company, or about innovation. About buses. I don’t know. I could hire any 20-old to give me this stuff. This is just a poor effort.” Now his eyes darted around the room. “You don’t have to get up there in front of five hundred or a thousand people tomorrow. You have to have creativity for something like this, not some stupid line about”—he looked again at the paper in his hand—“the industrial revolution. These people already know about the industrial revolution. This isn’t a history lecture. You can’t—.”

“Got it,” I said.

As I walked out of the office, Stewart, who’d heard some of the exchange, murmured, “Pride cometh after the fall.”

A few days later, I gave him two pages of themes. What they were I don’t remember—something about pollution at the Beijing Olympics, something about mass transit improving quality of life, and four or five other ideas. He hated them all.

I gave up. Let him figure out what to say himself, I thought.

Five or 10 minutes before he was supposed to leave for the event, he burst into the office.

“Okay, what am I saying at this thing? You’ve had time to think about it. Give me something. Go.”

“Governor,” I said, “I’m out. I’ve given you everything I can think of.”

“Okay, this is pathetic.” He gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes, like a wolf. “Pathetic. I can’t believe you’ve been with me for, what, three or four years now, and you can’t think of a single interesting thing to say at a—at a—at a whatever this is. I’ve got to walk into this thing, not you. I’ve got to stand up in front of a crowd, not you. And I don’t have jack to say. This is a joke.”

Somehow, I don’t know how, an idea came to me. “What’s the date?” I asked.

“Wha—?”

“The date. Isn’t it the fourth?”

Nat, who was listening silently, nodded yes.

“It’s Rosa Parks’s birthday.”

The governor just stared at me. His face softened. “That’s what you want,” I said. “Rosa Parks thought about buses in a new way. What she did on a bus changed the world. What TerraPax is doing with an old idea—the bus idea—has the potential to change the world. Both take courage. The one changed society for the better and made us a better nation. The other is improving our quality of life, or the quality of our air, or something, and it has the potential to make us a better society. Something like that.”

It was absolutely ridiculous, but it was perfect. I knew it and he knew it.

At last he said, “Okay. That’s something. That’s actually something.”

***

As bizarre as it sounds, the governor found all the negative media attention irresistible. The crowds of reporters, the incessant headlines, the necessity of responding every day to some new self-inflicted absurdity—there was something about it all that made him thrive.

During one press conference about some piece of legislation or other, a reporter asked, “Are you still seeing her—Maria?” You could see it on the governor’s face. He wanted the whole thing to go away. But not enough to ignore that question. The world was interested in his life, what he did with himself, who he was seeing, and that was a good deal better than ignoring him. He paused and looked around the room. And then he answered the question. “Well clearly, I mean, it’s not going to be easy to maintain a relationship across that geographical distance, but we’re working through that.”

“So you are still seeing her?” Hatfield persisted.

Quietly the politicians behind the governor began slipping away.

“Wwwwwell I mean, the obvious is the obvious. In other words...”

Later that night I was still in the office when the governor walked in.

“Okay,” he said. He sat down.

Open In New Window Barton Swain's newly published book, The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics. (Click for more information.)

Beyond the occasional greeting and an awkward chat at one of the mansion parties, he and I had never spoken to each other about anything unrelated to work. When you were in the car with him and the conversation inadvertently veered toward something remotely personal, he’d quickly switch topics or get on his phone or make up a reason to criticize you. Now he was sitting there for no reason, apparently needing to talk to somebody.

“What’d you think of that?” he asked.

“Well,” I said. Lots of things passed through my mind, but I just sat there stupidly saying, “Well.”

He waited.

At last I said, “Well, you’ve never been happy just saying what any politician would say. That’s what got you in trouble when this whole thing blew up. … Sometimes you should just say what every other politician would say. When Hatfield asked you whether you were still seeing her, you should have just said, ‘Donald, I’m not here to talk about my personal life.’ But you’re so addicted to being different, you just had to say something weird.”

There was truth in what I told him, even if I had put it in a way that would appeal to his self-regard; I admit that. But there was truth in it. He always had to say something original, something quotable or memorable. Instead of giving the press formulaic balderdash, he kept rummaging through the tawdry verbiage of middle-aged love affairs trying to find something redeemable, something that would show the world that his infantile obsession with a foreign divorcée was somehow nobler or more pardonable than the sordid entanglement of an average politician.

“Yeah, I guess that’s a big part of it,” he said. He leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. “I’m always looking for language that’s—I don’t know.”

“Language that’s what?”

He kept looking at the ceiling. “I don’t mean just language, just words. It’s more than words. It’s conceptual. It’s real. I always find myself trying to communicate something— larger.”

“Larger?” I said.

“Yeah. I know that sounds weird. And I don’t know what I mean by it exactly. It’s just—I feel there’s something— larger—you know, just bigger—bigger than what I’m able to communicate in words. That’s what I’m after.”

That’s what I’d been after, too, but I’d never found it.