Jeff Nussbaum

>>Good morning and welcome to Global Perspectives, I'm David Dumke.

Today we're joined by author and speechwriter Jeff Nussbaum.

Welcome to the show, Jeff.

>>Good to be with you.

>>Jeff, you have written for presidents, vice presidents, senators, CEOs, a variety of different people.

What gave you the idea to write this book, Undelivered?

>>So this book began when I was a kid working for Al Gore.

So the election of 2000, which is familiar to a lot of your viewers here in Florida.

On election night in Nashville, Gore had three speeches prepared, a victory speech, a concession speech, and then a third speech where we actually thought he might win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote.

And so there was a modification made explaining that.

That night, of course, the count went late into the night.

Gore gave no speech at all.

And it set me on this path of over the following years, looking for places where history turned and a speech went undelivered.

And I started to find them in all sorts of places, not just politics, moments in history, even moments in pop culture, even the Oscars when when they called la la land.

Best picture.

But it was actually moonlight.

So it started this obsession with finding places where history was moving in one direction, and then it shifted course and it left a draft of what the first steps down that alternate path might have been with the speech as as the door into a little bit of what that world might have looked like.

>>So it's - history, of course, there's so many times there could have been different outcomes of things.

And whether you're a political leader, civic leader, business leader, you're always expecting the unexpected.

You went through a range of different leaders ranging from King of the UK to to your you grew up in Boston to to Mayor White and the bussing issue.

What made you choose certain certain speeches?

>>Yeah, that's actually that's a great question.

So right as as you mentioned, we have King Edward in the United Kingdom who doesn't want to abdicate the throne but wants to marry Wallis Simpson.

And so he had a speech prepared, basically saying, I leave it in your hands, the British people, should I be your king?

And at the 11th hour, he decided ultimately to abdicate.

And as you mentioned, I'm from Boston.

And in the mid-seventies, there was an interesting mayor named Kevin White who had this the city in upheaval over a judge's order to use school bussing to integrate the schools.

And he actually considered potentially defying the judge's order and then decided at the 11th hour not to do it.

So the ones I chose really only had to meet two criteria.

The first was do they reveal something interesting about history, a moment at which history turned and we could have seen a little bit of an alternative path.

And the second criteria or criterion is that the leader had to engage with them.

There are lots of speeches that go undelivered.

The person who was set to deliver them never really sees or engages with.

And so people who've seen the book said, Do you have Nixon's moon landing failure speech?

Some people have seen that there was a speech prepared, but there's no evidence that Nixon ever actually saw it or seriously considered it.

Similarly, in the introduction, I talk about Harry Truman, who had a speech prepared announcing that the United States would not pursue hydrogen bomb technology any further.

In other words, we were going to kind of cap our nuclear ambitions and excuse me.

And he said, when presented with this speech, can the Russians do it?

He was told, yes, they can.

And he sort of swept the speech off his desk and said, we're going to do it.

So those don't make it into the book because there's no evidence that the leader ever actually really engaged with them.

So those were the two two selection criteria.

And then I tried to keep it largely to the 1900s.

But other than that, as you said, it does run the gamut from from political to military to to in some cases, pop culture.

>>You have to have a chapter in there about John Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is pretty chilling when you when you read it.

And as we were talking about earlier with the book, you have - you had a problem finding who had authorship of that, that particularly dark speech.

>>Yeah, exactly.

So during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy really took charge, the president's brother and divided the National Security Council into two groups, which was then called the ex-con, the executive committee of the National Security Council.

And one group was in favor of a naval blockade and one group was in favor of an air strike.

And this in history is the first use of the term hawks and doves.

So the air strike group were the war hawks, the blockade group were the Picasso doves.

And Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, says we're going to make a recommendation to the president.

The first document that you present as part of your recommendation has to be a speech to the nation.

In other words, I love this is a tool of leadership.

Right.

Basically saying it if you can't explain it, you know, maybe it's not the right course of action.

Only years later, decades later, do we learn that some of these missile sites were active already.

So it wasn't just air strikes under missile missile sites under construction, it was air strikes on missile sites that were active.

And not only were they active, but control was in the hands of the battery commanders on the ground, so they didn't have to call back to Russia.

So it's quite clear that if we had launched these air strikes, at the very least, you know, our base in Guantanamo Bay would have been vaporized.

Certainly where we're sitting right now probably wouldn't exist anymore.

So so this becomes this very harrowing thing when they realize, oh, my goodness, only now do we realize how disastrous this course of action could have been.

And everyone who could have been involved in writing the speech denies having written it.

So in the book, I actually you know, I have the draft of it and it's typed, but there's handwritten notes all over it.

And so I actually had an FBI forensic analyst go look and see who at least who wrote on it.

And as I went through this process, it becomes quite clear that one of the people who denied having written it actually did have a hand in it.

And and one of the things I, I believe, is that, you know, he denied it throughout his life and career.

And I believe he believes he didn't write it.

You know, one of the things I've experienced and I talk about in this book is that sometimes the pressure is so intense, the moment is moving, the, you know, events are moving so quickly you don't actually remember what you've done.

I've gone back and looked at speeches I've written on issues of war and peace at times of immense tension.

And I remember exactly where I was sitting.

I remember, you know, working through the red lines.

And I look at the speech and think, I don't know.

I have no idea what this is like.

And so really, your mind can kind of create these truths.

>>Well, you've you've you've written for for different, different people.

So I want to talk a little about the process of speechwriting, because this book is very much it's about your own profession in many ways, although it's looking looking at history.

But when you, Jeff Nussbaum, write a speech for for Joe Biden or for for any any leader, but most recently, you were the chief speechwriter for President Biden.

When does a speech go from becoming a Jeff Nussbaum speech to a Joe Biden speech?

>>Well, the speech belongs to the speaker.

It really does.

And often when I work with folks, they say, how do you make it sound like me?

And really, you can make something sound like someone by watching videos of them or reading transcripts or interviewing them and transcribing, which is part of the process.

I will when I work with someone, I'll interview them.

I'll pepper them with questions.

I'll try to give them their words back to them.

Re-organized and supplemented with research.

But really the question isn't how do you make it sound like me?

It's how do you make it think like me?

And so I spend a lot of time with the folks I work with, trying to understand how they approach the world, how they approach problems.

Because if it thinks like them, it starts to sound like them.

And my goal and others are different.

You know, I think if you look at George W Bush's speeches on paper, they're some of the most beautiful speeches.

You will ever see.

He had incredibly talented writers and thinkers working for him, but when he delivered them, there was a disconnect because they didn't sound organic or authentic to him.

It was often you thought you were listening to a guy walking a tightrope, like, Is he going to make it to the end of this phrase?

And so for me, I always write not with some platonic ideal of what a speech should be in mind.

I write it in the hopes of helping the person I'm writing for be their best self.

They're not an empty vessel to be filled up.

They are.

I start to know where they're coming from and what they're looking for.

And that's what ultimately I'm writing to, not my sense of what they want to say, but their sense of what they want to say.

>>How much of a good speech comes down to deliver as opposed to the words that are actually written.

>>A lot and at risk of undercutting what I've done for a quarter century here.

There's a saying attributed, perhaps correctly to Maya Angelou.

They'll they'll never remember what you said.

They'll remember how you made them feel.

And so that's why when you look at a speech on paper, it doesn't look like an essay.

It looks like sheet music.

There's lots of blank spaces and underlines and dashes as as the speaker marks it up because you want it to be sheet music.

You want the audience to feel the rhythm.

You want them to feel something.

And the words play a role in that.

But they don't play the entire role in that.

>>Jeff, you've you've been recognized for your humor as well and your humorous writing.

In fact, you're one of your big first written works was with James Carville.

How does that inject into speeches and how does that make.

First of all, a speech more effective, especially if you're talking about a serious topic, but you're still trying to inject some humor.

>>Yeah, of course I can give you I can give you chapter and verse on humor.

But I always tell folks I work with humor is not just for the joke at the beginning of the speech.

Humor is an immensely powerful way.

And by the way, there's nothing less funny than describing humor.

So so there's, you know, humor theory is not funny, but jokes are funny.

But, you know, humor can be an immensely effective way to deal with a controversy.

Right.

Laughing it off.

And I can give examples of this, you know, an effective way to stick a dagger in your opponent in a way that would make you look bad if it weren't done with a smile.

And a really effective way to connect with your audience.

So humor actually serves real goals.

That's why self-deprecating humor works so well.

It it lessens the stature gap between the speaker and the audience, makes them feel relatable and and shows, hey, if I can laugh at myself, which which basically tells the audience, this is someone I can I can support.

They don't take themselves too seriously.

They're not holding themselves above me.

So humor does all of these things.

And so I'm constantly trying to infuse it in into not just the top of speeches, you know, not just the nice to be here joke, but actually using it to make serious points.

>>Can you make a speaker funny who truly isn't very funny?

>>Yeah, right.

The goal is to at the very least make them intentionally funny as opposed to unintentionally funny.

And yes, and this is the other reason humor is very powerful, which is most of the people I write for who you see giving speeches aren't expected to be funny.

And so they get credit for trying.

Right.

This is why dad jokes actually work.

Even groaner jokes.

You get credit for knowing what funny is.

So even just saying, you know, as Stephen Colbert said the other day and repeating the joke, you get the same laugh as if you had come up with it yourself.

So you can make someone who is not naturally funny, funny by by either doing things like that or by showing that they're willing to understand a little bit of the ridiculousness of whatever industry they're in.

Right.

A CEO who's able to joke and tell a joke about his or her industry, a politician or elected official who's able to tell a joke about the Senate or, you know, or whoever.

Like, it just it opens up that humanity, which helps connect with the audience.

And again, that's the ultimate goal of every speech, is to move an audience to action or allegiance.

And humor helps move an audience to allegiance by getting them to say, I like this person.

>>Who's the most natural you've seen deliver speeches.

I mean, you've been around politics for for three decades, essentially, you know, and you've seen different people perform in different ways.

They can be effective in different ways, too.

But who do you say, Wow, that person.

>>It's it's a great question because it's almost like it's almost like films where it's like you won't say a horror movie is is a great film, but a horror movie can be a good movie.

You know, an action movie can be a good movie judged on its own terms.

And the reason I say that is because some people are orators, right?

They deliver beautiful orations.

Some speakers are conversationalists, and they make you feel like they're you're in a conversation with them.

Right.

So President Obama, beautiful orator, like his his he worked magic on big stages with big audiences in a way that he I mean, he was he was multitalented, multifaceted across the board.

But like, you know, his stuff didn't land as well in small rooms whereas Bill Clinton and you'd see him drape himself over the lectern, you know, he was a conversationalist.

And so you felt like you were in conversation with him.

You know, each of them brought their own brought their own strengths and on their own terms were super effective.

I don't know that I could, you know, in the playoff bracket of speakers, I've I've known, you know, I don't know that I could declare one winner.

>>But you've certainly got some people in contention for the Final Four.

>>Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

>>So Joe Biden, he's a beloved figure by many.

And of course, this is a very polarized era.

So sometimes the speeches aren't going to deliver to certain audiences.

How are these - does that make it tougher as a speechwriter?

It's like we know this is what President Biden brings to the table.

This is what we're dealing with.

This is what we're facing.

We're going to get criticized as no matter what we say, How does that factor into what you're what you're trying to?

>>Yeah, one of the things that I've seen change over my 25 years in writing speeches in and out of the public sector is early on, you were much more likely to be speaking to a broad audience.

And so therefore, you're going to spend a lot of time educating them and then a little bit of time hoping to activate them.

Now, with audiences so polarized and easily identifiable and atomized and balkanized, you know, choose your word.

You're speaking to an audience where you pretty much know where they are and you're just trying to educate a little and activate a lot.

And one of the things that I love about Joe Biden is he's he's of the school that was more like when I was starting my career, which is, you know, he believes that everyone is persuadable.

Everyone is redeemable.

He almost to a fault is continuing to look for common ground, is continuing to look for unlikely or not entirely natural alliances.

And so he, in a weird way, is the exception that proves the rule, which is with him.

He likes to spend more time educating.

He really tries to the number of times I was in meetings with him where he was saying, okay, but tell me, you know, if we approve this, you know, this money which dredges this port, you know, what does it mean for the jobs there?

What does it mean for the people that live in the community?

Because fuel oil comes in here.

Does it?

How much does it lower the cost of someone's home winter bills?

So he goes deep, deep, deep on the explanation part so that he can educate himself and his audience and less on the activations.

So so for him, every opportunity is an opportunity to find a friend or find an ally, which I think is sadly missing from a lot of our politics today.

>>Is the goal to educate?

Do people listen still to the or are they looking for a soundbite?

>>Well, that's the other thing is, you know, speeches used to be consumed as a whole.

Right.

Almost throughout history, speeches were consumed as entertainment.

You know, let's pack a picnic and go watch the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Let's gather around the radio and listen to the fireside chats.

And that's the other change that has happened over the course of my career is speeches which were once consumed top to bottom, start to finish.

You know, you listen to the whole album now, you listen to tracks.

And so even as you're writing in your mind, you say this is going to be the tweet and this is going to be the Instagram story.

And this paragraph is going to go into the fundraising letter and this is going to go into the annual letter.

And so even as you are the speechwriting process allows you to get all the thinking in one place, you are starting to write a speech with the knowledge that it's going to become a Jenga tower and pieces are going to get pulled out and used in different places.

And I've watched that evolution as I've as I've been, you know, worked in public life.

And it's been fascinating to see because it went from whole speeches.

And then in the 2008 campaign, when I was on the Obama campaign, that was really the first campaign where you had a lot of YouTube going on.

And so you would chop up a speech into three or four minute clips and people would watch the clip and maybe they would then factor into the whole speech.

But very few people, very many people were watching the clips and very few people were watching the whole thing.

>>Where do you rank the value of speeches?

You know, your State of the Union speech at the one end of a of a really broad comprehensive policy proposal as opposed to a four minute clip?

>>Right.

You know, different speeches, different goals.

You know, State of the Union is an attempt.

It's one of the few opportunities where you get a larger audience, including an audience of people who might not see what's happening every day.

So so those are you know, those are tentpole events, tempo of speeches, state of the unions, primetime addresses, you know, you know, other addresses to Congress and national tragedy addresses like those are really the the few opportunities where you have a chance to speak to an audience that won't see you every day.

So those are the ones where you tend to take a step back and try to describe what is this all about at a high level, right?

Why am I why did I run in the first place?

Why am I here?

What am I trying to achieve?

So those tend to be the moments where you step back and say, What is it all about?

You know, what are the ends?

And then those four minute speeches, the radio addresses, the announcements that, you know, the grant announcement of infrastructure funding.

Right.

Those are the means to the end.

Here's what's happening on this bridge or this tunnel or this port in your community.

And and here, let's ladder it back up to here's what it's about.

And then you sort of pull in some of that language from the tentpole addresses.

>>You know, starting in the nineties especially, you had a lot of of speechwriting that where you used folk where people used to I'm not saying you particularly but people used focus groups and obviously were looking at polls to try to get, you know, positive response to different aspects.

But you can you can, can you, can you overdo it and trying to be too precise.

We're supposed to you know, you would talk about Mayor White earlier and you you had mentioned, you know, 80% of the people opposed the bussing policy, but he still went for that policy.

>>That's exactly right.

I think polls, when you try to use them to basically say, I'm going to take all of the polling questions where my position is over 60% and string them together into a speech.

You can see through it like you actually can hear the polling behind the speaker and it becomes ineffective because it feels too granular, it feels too small.

It feels like there's not an overarching thing.

And remember, people, even though people will often vote against their interests, as they describe on their polls because they want to vote for a leader that brings other characteristics beyond an assemblage of policy positions.

So I think polls are perfectly useful in telling you where people are.

They're not useful in telling you where people want to go and people don't really tell polls what they want because they don't quite know what they want until they see it.

I mean, this is in product market research, too, right?

Like the famous Henry Ford quote, If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse, you know?

So that's the weakness of polls.

But we brought up Kevin White.

So and I love this example because in the book we have the chapter of the State of the City speech he decided not to give.

And here he is in Boston where we have this judge's order that the schools need to be integrated.

And the plan is to basically, you know, send students of color into South Boston, send students from South Boston into into Roxbury, which is which is very black community.

And it's chaos.

It's bedlam.

There are riots in South Boston.

People die and the mayor basically says if Boston were a sovereign state, like I would be deposed.

80% of people were against bussing.

And he ultimately decides he's going to give a very strong speech, The speech he ultimately gives where he says, we believe in the rule of law in this country.

We may not like it, but this is this is the law.

This is the judge's order.

I'm going to try to fulfill it to the best of my ability, and we're going to live with it and we're going to move on together.

So he does something that is 80% unpopular in his city and he runs for reelection and he wins.

And I think it's just a wonderful triumph of leadership of a leader basically saying, if I go by the polls, I'm going to do this one thing, but I'm actually going to do what's right and I'm going to explain to you.

And he went and explained he had hundreds of coffees throughout the city.

He went to people's living rooms.

And and it was just a reminder that that leaders who stand up and do the right thing may not always win, but they but they feel better about the loss if they lose doing the right thing and they can feel much better about the win because they've brought people along.

>>Do do do people reward that kind of leadership or or is that a rare example of it?

>>You know, you know, the answer to this question that better than I. I think people reward that kind of leadership more than we think they do.

They do.

You know, look on the right and the left, you know, John McCain was was frequently rewarded for for, you know, what he would have termed maverick leadership.

I think you do see it more and more and you see it in the fact that the leaders who overperform are the ones who sometimes give people bad news, too.

>>What's the difference between writing for a business leader and a political leader?

>>Yeah, it's really about audience because, you know, in political speeches you have a couple of different audiences.

Frequently you have the audience is represented by the people in the room, and then you have the audiences as represented by the cameras at the back of the room.

And so it's very clear that the whole audience is always external, right?

It's always a larger population.

Business leaders a little bit different in that they very clearly delineate their communications between internal and external communications.

Now, one of the changes that's happening is everything is now an external communication.

All it takes is for a memo to leak or a speech to leak, and your internal communication becomes an external communication.

But I often tell my CEO clients, you know, a company with 30,000 people, you know, I tell the CEO, you are mayor of a city of 30,000, so you have to be mayor of your city of 30,000.

While also then speaking to that outside audience of investors, your board, you know the world at large.

So in a way, it's different.

But but it's not actually that different.

>>We just have a minute.

Have a minute left.

So I want to ask you, you obviously got into speechwriting because it's not just a craft, but it's a vocation you clearly love.

Do you still have the passion for it?

>>I do.

I do.

You know, when I started, you know, I wrote I started as an intern in Al Gore's speechwriting office.

And I got the internship because I wrote a a a wiseguy essay about the fact that my sister, when she was one year old, wet the carpet in the Oval Office.

She wet the rug in the Oval Office.

We were on a tour.

And so I said, I just want a chance to improve the improve.

You know, very few people get a chance to make their mark in the Oval Office.

I just want a chance to improve the one my sister already made.

And they said, Throw the guy in speechwriting.

So.

So that was the first time I realized that speechwriting could be a job, never mind a profession.

But it's this wonderful opportunity to be in the room where it happens, to see decisions getting made and to help leaders articulate why they do what they do.

So I've I've loved my career to this point.

I continue to love it when I want to write, see my own name.

I write my own thing.

But helping others advance their visions and their agendas is really exciting and words having power and doing that.

>>So Undelivered.

It's coming out in paperback soon.

Do you have any other book projects on the road?

>>I have a couple of years.

I'm not going to share them with your audience right now.

But but, but I have a couple of stories that I want to tell.

And and so I hope that I will be able to do that a little faster than I did this book, which ultimately was a decade long project.

>>Well, it's a it's it's a it's a the fruit of your labors are definitely well worth the time.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Jeff.

>>Great to be with you.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.